Companies That Wear Their Values on Their Sleeves

March 31, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We lead with our values because it’s easier to connect with somebody who shares our priorities, but it’s a trickier proposition for companies that want our loyalty because we have rarely been so divided about what is important to us.

Deepening divisions over our common commitments make Apple’s roll-out of a suite of new services this week both riveting—and potentially fraught.

As the company’s newly announced services like AppleTV+ and AppleNews+ tie themselves more closely to Hollywood and the cover stories that sell glossy magazines, is Apple cloaking itself in values that could alienate or confuse many of the customers it aims to bond with more closely?

In 1997, on the eve of launching a new, national advertising campaign, Steve Jobs gave a short talk about the link between Apple’s values and its customers. “At our core, we believe in making the world a better place,” he said. So our ads will “honor people who have changed the world for the better—[because] if they ever used a computer, it would be a Mac.” In its marketing, Apple aligned itself with tech innovators like Thomas Edison, a genius who had already changed the world as Jobs and Apple were about to do.

A little more than 20 years later, with Apple following in the footsteps of Edison’s light-bulb company to industry dominance, the question is whether it would have a better chance of preserving that dominance by once again aligning itself with technology innovators who have already changed the world instead of those, like Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey, who aim to do so by relying on their own approaches to social betterment? To set the stage for your possible reactions, here is a link, beginning with Spielberg and ending with Winfrey, that covers the highlights from Apple’s new services launch this past week in a vivid, all-over-the-place 15 minutes.

I should confess that I have a bit of a horse in this race because I want Apple to keep winning by bringing me world-class products and customer care, but I’m not sure that it can by pursuing services (like entertainment, news and games through the new AppleArcade) that put the company in lockstep with industries that muddy its focus and dilute its values proposition.

Instead of bringing me a global version of Oprah’s book club or more of Steven Speilberg’s progressive reminiscences, I was hoping to hear that Apple would be providing—even in stages over months or years—an elegantly conceived and designed piece of technology that would (1) allow me to cut the cable cord with my internet provider while (2) upgrading me to an interface where I could see and pay for whatever visual programming I choose whenever I want it. An ApplePay-enabled entertainment router. Now that would be the kind of tech innovation that would change my world for the better again (and maybe yours too) while staying true to its founder’s messaging from twenty-odd years ago.

Tech commentator Christopher Mims talked this week about why Apple was claiming values (like those embedded in Oprah’s notion of social responsibility) to maintain its market share, but he never really debated whether it should do so. I’d argue that Apple should continue to make its own case for the social benefits of its tech solutions instead of mixing its message about priorities with the aspirations of our celebrity culture.

When it comes to Silicon Valley’s mostly hypocritcal claims about social responsibility, I start with the skepticism of observers like Anand Giridharadas. To him, Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple all use values as tools to gain the profits they’re after, covering their self-serving agendas with feel-good marketing.

In a post last October, I discussed some of his observations about Facebook (and by implication, most of the others) in the context of his recent book, Winners Take All.

The problem, said Giridharadas, is that while these companies are always taking credit for the efficiencies and other benefits they have brought, they take no responsibility whatsoever for the harms… In their exercise of corporate social responsibility, there is a mismatch between the solutions that the tech entrepreneurs can and want to bring and the problems we have that need to be solved. “Tending to the public welfare is not an efficiency problem, The work of governing a society is tending to everybody. It’s figuring out universal rules and norms and programs that express the value of the whole and take care of the common welfare.” By contrast, the tech industry sees the world more narrowly. For example, the fake news controversy lead Facebook not to a comprehensive solution for providing reliable information but to what Giridharadas calls “the Trying-to-Solve-the-Problem-with-the-Tools-that-Caused-It” quandary.

In the face of judgments like his, I’d argue that Apple should be vetting its corporate messaging with the inside guidance of those who understand the power of values before it squanders the high ground it still holds.

Beyond “sticking with the tech innovations that it’s good at” and the Edison-type analogies that add to their luster, what follows are three proposals for how the company might build on its values-based loyalty while still looking us in the eye when it does so.

Each one has Apple talking about what its tech-appreciating customers still care about most when they think—with healthy nostalgia—about all the things that Apple has done for them already.

The fate that the company is aiming to avoid

1. Apple should keep reminding us about its unparalleled customer service

The unbelievable service I have come to expect from Apple feeds my brand loyalty. I feel that we share the value of trustworthiness. When someone relies on me for something, I stand behind it instead of telling them I don’t have the time or it’s too expensive to fix. For me, Apple has consistently done the same.

So I was surprised when I had to argue a bit harder than I thought was necessary for Apple’s battery fix for an older iPhone, and I started following other customer complaints against the company to see if a change of priorities was in the air. Since I’m writing to you on a MacBook Air, problems with the Air’s later generation keyboards have apparently escalated to the point that national class-action litigation is in the offing. Not unlike the iPhone battery fix, Apple has gone on record as being willing to replace any sticky keyboard for free within 4 years of purchase, but is it really as easy as it sounds? As recently as last week, there was this plea to Apple from a tech reviewer in a national newspaper after profiling a litany of customer difficulties:

For any Apple engineers and executives reading: This is the experience you’re providing customers who shell out $1200 or more—sometimes a lot more. This is the experience after THREE attempts at this keyboard design.

When you are one of the richest companies in history, relatively inexpensive problems like this need to be solved before they get this far. A reputation for world-class customer service is a terrible thing to waste. Be glad to fix your technology on those rare occasions when it breaks down, and solve the technology problem with these keyboards before you sell or replace any more of them. Don’t make customers who were loyal enough to pay a premium for an Apple device take you to court because they can’t get enough of your attention any other way. Caring for your customers is a core value that needs polishing before its shine begins to fade and your customer loyalty slips away.

2. Apple should keep telling us how much it’s different from Google, Facebook and Amazon

The uses that the dominant tech platforms are making of our personal data are on everyone’s mind.

Beyond invasions of privacy, deep concerns are also being voiced about the impact of “surveillance capitalism” on Western democracy, not only because of meddling with our elections but, even more fundamentally, because of how this new economic model disrupts “the organic reciprocities involving employment and consumption” that undergird democratic market systems. These are profound and increasingly wide-spread concerns, and Apple for one seems to share them.

This is from another post last October called “Looking Out For the Human Side of Technology”:

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

‘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…so Cook’s (and Apple’s) motives here have more than a dollop of competitive self-interest where [companies like] 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.

In its star-studded launch of TV, News and Arcade services this week, Apple’s presenters always reiterated that none of these services would be “ad selling models” targeting Apple users. They’re good reminders about Apple’s values but…while $5B is a lot of revenue to forsake if new purchasers of Apple devices got to pick their own search engines, it’s also a significant amount of support for an antithetical business model.

Not selling my data to others for use against me, like Apple’s standing behind the functionality of my devices, are core contributors to the company’s good reputation in my mind, and never more so than today. If Apple continues to differentiate itself from its competitors on the use of our data—and I think that it should—it needs to find ways to be more forthright about its own conflicts of interest while doing so.

When you stand on your values and back it up with your actions, the competitors you are challenging will always seek to undermine you when your actions are inconsistent with your words. Why let that inconsistency be tomorrow’s headline, Tim? Why not be ready to talk more forthrightly about the quandary with Google, and how the company is trying to address it, when asked to comment before a “gotcha” story like this gets published?

3. Apple should get ahead of its new services launch by proactively addressing likely problems with real consequences for the rest of us

In its roll-out presentation, Apple announced plans for a new service that will link players to games that Apple will be creating. Few tech areas have seen more startling impacts from the use of behavioral data that’s being gathered from players by those who are behind these on-line games. I recently talked here about how the programmers and monitors behind Fortnite and the updated Tetris games are using data about how players react to as many as 200 “persuasive design elements” in these games to enhance the intensity of the player experience while making it more addictive to boys and other susceptible populations.

Apple’s engineers know about these issues already. Its programmers are making its new games ready for primetime as soon as next fall. To differentiate itself from others in the on-line gaming industry, to strike a more principled note than its competitors have, and to broaden the scope of Apple’s values when it comes to personal data, the company could tell us some or all of the following in the coming months:

-whether it will be using behavioral data it generates from players through real time play to make its games more absorbing or addictive;

-whether it intends to restrict certain classes of users (like pre-teen boys) from playing certain games or restrict the hours that they can play them;

-what other safeguards it will be implementing to limit the amount of “player attention” that these games will be capturing;

-whether it will be selling game-related merchandise in the Apple store so its financial incentives to encourage extensive game-playing are clear from the outset; and

-whether it will be using data about player behavior to encourage improved learning, collaborative problem-solving, community building and other so-called “pro-social” skills in any of the games it will be offering.

I have no reason to doubt that Apple is serious about protecting the user data that its devices and services generate. Its new venture into gaming provides an opportunity to build on Apple’s reputation for safeguarding the use of its customers’ information. Tim Cook and Apple need to be talking to the rest of us, both now and next fall, about how it will be applying its data-related values to problems its customers care about today in the brave new world of on-line gaming.

+ + +

Apple’s stated values will hold its current customers and attract new ones when there is “a match” between the company’s solutions and the problems the rest of us have that need solving. Affiliation and loyalty grow when there are shared priorities in communities, in politics and in the marketplace.

That means Apple should keep talking about what its tech-appreciating customers care about most in the light of the wonders that Apple has given us already. Despite its recently announced forays into entertainment, the company should never take its eye too far from what it does best—which is to make world-changing devices—even when they take more time to develop than short-term financial performance seems to demand.

When a company knows what it is and acts accordingly, it can always take risks for the rewards that can come from wearing its values on its sleeves.

This post was adapted from my March 31, 2019 newsletter. You can subscribe (to the right) and receive it in your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Human Purpose Behind Smart Cities

March 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It is human priorities that should be driving Smart City initiatives, like the ones in Toronto profiled here last week.

Last week’s post also focused on a pioneering spirit in Toronto that many American cities and towns seem to have lost. While we entrench in the moral righteousness of our sides in the debate—including, for many, a distrust of collective governance, regulation and taxation—we drift towards an uncertain future instead of claiming one that can be built on values we actually share.

In its King Street and Quayside initiatives, Toronto is actively experimenting with the future it wants based on its residents’ commitment to sustaining their natural environment in the face of urban life’s often toxic impacts. They’re conducting these experiments in a relatively civil, collaborative and productive way—an urban role model for places that seem to have forgotten how to work together. Toronto’s bold experiments are also utilizing “smart” technologies in their on-going attempts to “optimize” living and working in new, experimental communities.

During a short trip this week, I got to see the leading edges of New York City’s new Hudson Yards community (spread over 28 acres with an estimated $25 billion price tag) and couldn’t help being struck by how much it catered to those seeking more luxury living, shopping and workspaces than Manhattan already affords. In other words, how much it could have been a bold experiment about new ways that all of its citizens might live and work in America’s first city for the next half-century, but how little it actually was. A hundred years ago, one of the largest immigrant migrations in history made New York City the envy of the world. With half of its current citizens being foreign-born, perhaps the next century, unfurling today, belongs to newer cities like Toronto.

Still, even with its laudable ambition, it will not be easy for Toronto and other future-facing communities to get their Smart City initiatives right, as several of you were also quick to remind me last week. Here is a complaint from a King Street merchant that one of you (thanks Josh!) found and forwarded that seems to cast what is happening in Toronto in a less favorable light than I had focused upon it:

What a wonderful story. But as with [all of] these wonderful plans some seem to be forgotten. As it appears are the actual merchants. Google certainly a big winner here. Below an excerpt written by one of the merchants:

‘The City of Toronto has chosen the worst time, in the worst way, in the worst season to implement the pilot project. Their goal is clearly to move people through King St., not to King St. For years King St. was a destination, now it is a thoroughfare.

‘The goal of the King St. Pilot project was said to be to balance three important principles: to move people more effectively on transit, to support business and economic prosperity and to improve public space. In its current form, the competing principles seem to be decidedly tilted away from the economic well-being of merchants and biases efficiency over convenience. The casual stickiness of pedestrians walking and stopping at stores, restaurants and other merchants is lost.

‘Additionally, the [transit authority] TTC has eliminated a number of stops along King St., forcing passengers to walk further to enter and disembark streetcars, further reducing pedestrian traffic and affecting areas businesses. The TTC appears to believe that if they didn’t have to pick up and drop off people, they could run their system more effectively.

‘The dubious benefits of faster street car traffic on King St. notwithstanding, the collateral damage of the increased traffic of the more than 20,000 cars the TTC alleges are displaced from King St to adjoining streets has turned Adelaide, Queen, Wellington and Front Sts. into a gridlock standstill. Anyone who has tried to navigate the area can attest that much of the time, no matter how close you are you can’t get there from here.

‘Along with the other merchants of King St. and the Toronto Entertainment District we ask that Mayor Tory and Toronto council to consider a simple, reasonable and cost-effective alternative. Put lights on King St. that restrict vehicle traffic during rush hours, but return King St. to its former vibrant self after 7 p.m., on weekends and statutory holidays. It’s smart, fair, reasonable and helps meet the goals of the King St. pilot project.

Two things about this complaint seemed noteworthy. The first is how civil and constructive this criticism is in a process that hopes to “iterate” as real time impacts are assessed. It’s a tribute that Toronto’s experiments not only invite but are also receiving feedback like this. Alas, the second take-away from Josh’s comment is far more nettlesome. “[However many losers there may be along the way:] Google certainly a big winner here.”

The tech giant’s partnership with Canada’s governments in Toronto raises a constellation of challenging issues, but it’s useful to recall that pioneers who dare to claim new frontiers always do so with the best technology that’s available. While the settling of the American West involved significant collateral damage (to Native Americans and Chinese migrants, to the buffalo and the land itself), it would not have been possible without existing innovations and new ones that these pioneers fashioned along the way. Think of the railroads, the telegraph poles, even something as low-tech as the barbed wire that was used to contain livestock.

The problem isn’t human and corporate greed or heartless technology—we know about them already—but failing to recognize and reduce their harmful impacts before it is too late. The objective for pioneers on new frontiers should always be maximizing the benefits while minimizing the harms that can be foreseen from the very beginning instead of looking back with anger after the damage is done.

We have that opportunity with Smart City initiatives today.

Because they concentrate many of the choices that will have to be made when we boldly dare to claim the future of America again, I’ve been looking for a roadmap through the moral thicket in the books and articles that are being written about these initiatives today. Here are some of the markers that I’ve discovered.

Human priorities, realized with the help of technology

1. Markers on the Road to Smarter and More Vibrant Communities

The following insights come almost entirely from a short article by Robert Kitchin, a professor at Maynooth University in Ireland. In my review of the on-going conversation about Smart Cities, I found him to be one of its most helpful observers.

In his article, Kitchin discusses the three principal ways that smart cities are understood, the key promises smart initiatives make to stakeholders, and the perils to be avoided around these promises.

Perhaps not surprisingly, people envision cities and other communities “getting smarter” in different ways. One constituency sees an opportunity to improve both “urban regulation and governance through instrumentation and data-driven systems”–essentially, a management tool. A bolder and more transformative vision sees information and communication technology “re-configur[ing] human capital, creativity, innovation, education, sustainability, and management,” thereby “produc[ing] smarter citizens, workers and public servants” who “can enact polic[ies], produce better products… foster indigenous entrepreneurship and attract inward investment.” The first makes the frontier operate more efficiently while the second improves nearly every corner of it.

The third Smart City vision is “a counter-weight or alternative” to each of them. It wants these technologies “to promote a citizen-centric model of development that fosters social innovation and social justice, civic engagement and hactivism, and transparent and accountable governance.” In this model, technology serves social objectives like greater equality and fairness. Kitchin reminds us that these three visions are not mutually exclusive. It seems to me that the priorities embedded in a community’s vision of a “smarter” future could include elements of each of them, functioning like checks and balances, in tension with one another.

Smart City initiatives promise to solve pressing urban problems, including poor economic performance; government dysfunction; constrained mobility; environmental degradation; a declining quality of life, including risks to safety and security; and a disengaged, unproductive citizen base. Writes Kitchin:

the smart city promises to solve a fundamental conundrum of cities – how to reduce costs and create economic growth and resilience at the same time as producing sustainability and improving services, participation and quality of life – and to do so in commonsensical, pragmatic, neutral and apolitical ways.

Once again, it’s a delicate balancing act with a range of countervailing interests and constituencies, as you can see in the chart from a related discussion above.

The perils of Smart Cities should never overwhelm their promise in my view, but urban pioneers should always have them in mind (from planning through implementation) because some perils only manifest themselves over time. According to Kitchin, the seven dangers in pursuing these initiatives include:

–taking “a ‘one size fits all’ approach, treating cities as generic markets and solutions [that are] straightforwardly scalable and movable”;

–assuming that initiatives are “objective and non-ideological, grounded in either science or commonsense.” You can aim for these ideals, but human and organizational preferences and biases will always be embedded within them.

–believing that the complex social problems in communities can be reduced to “neatly defined technical problems” that smart technology can also solve. The ways that citizens have always framed and resolved their community problems cannot be automated so easily. (This is also the thrust of Ben Green’s Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, which will be published by MIT Press in April. In it he argues for “smart enough alternatives” that are attainable with the help of technology but never reducible to technology solutions alone.)

–engaging with corporations that are using smart city technologies “to capture government functions as new market opportunities.” One risk of a company like Google to communities like Toronto’s is that Google might lock Toronto in to its proprietary technologies and vendors over a long period of time or use Toronto’s citizen data to gain business opportunities in other cities.

–becoming straddled with “buggy, brittle and hackable” systems that are ever more “complicated, interconnected and dependent on software” while becoming more resistant to manual fixes.

–becoming victimized by “pervasive dataveillance that erodes privacy” through practices like “algorithmic social sorting (whether people get a loan, a tenancy, a job, etc), dynamic pricing (whereby different people pay varying prices depending on their perceived customer value) and anticipatory governance using predictive profiling (wherein data precedes how a person is policed and governed).” Earlier this month, my post on popular on-line games like Fortnite highlighted the additional risk that invasive technologies can use the data they are gathering to change peoples’ behavior.

-and lastly, reinforcing existing power structures and inequalities instead of eroding or reconfiguring them.

While acknowledging the promise of Smart Cities at their best, Kitchin closes his article with this cautionary note:

the realities of implementation are messier and more complex than the marketing hype of corporations or city managers portray and there are a number of social, political, ethical and legal concerns with respect to the kind of society smart city initiatives seek to create. As such, whilst networked urbanism has benefits, it also poses challenges and risks that are often little explored or legislated for ahead of implementation. Indeed, the pace of development and rollout of smart city technologies is proceeding well ahead of wider reflection, critique and regulation.

Putting the cart before a suitably-designed horse is a problem with all new and seductive technologies that get embraced before their harms are identified or can be addressed—a quandary that was also considered here in a post called “Looking Out for the Human Side of Technology.”

2. The Value of Our Data

A few additional considerations about the Smart City are also worth bearing in mind as debate about these initiatives intensifies.

In a March 8, 2019 post, Kurtis McBride wrote about two different ways “to value” the data that these initiatives will produce, and his distinction is an important one. It’s a discussion that citizens, government officials and tech companies should be having, but unfortunately are not having as much as they need to.

When Smart City data is free to everyone, there is the risk that the multinationals generating it will merely use it to increase their power and profits in the growing market for Smart City technologies and services. From the residents’ perspective, McBride argues that it’s “reasonable for citizens to expect to see benefit” from their data, while noting that these same citizens will also be paying dearly for smart upgrades to their communities. His proposal on valuing citizen data depends on how it will be used by tech companies like Google or local service providers. For example, if citizen data is used:

to map the safest and fastest routes for cyclists across the city and offers that information free to all citizens, [the tech company] is providing citizen benefit and should be able to access the needed smart city data free of charge.

But, if a courier company uses real-time traffic data to optimize their routes, improving their productivity and profit margins – there is no broad citizen benefit. In those cases, I think it’s fair to ask those organizations to pay to access the needed city data, providing a revenue stream cities can then use to improve city services for all.

Applying McBride’s reasoning, an impartial body in a city like Toronto would need to decide whether Google has to pay for data generated in its Quayside community by consulting a benefit-to-citizens standard. Clearly, if Google wanted to use Quayside data in a Smart City initiative in say Colorado or California, it would need to pay Toronto for the use of its citizens’ information.

Of course, addressing the imbalance between those (like us) who provide the data and the tech companies that use it to increase their profits and influence is not just a problem for Smart City initiatives, and changing the “value proposition” around our data is surely part of the solution. In her new book Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for a Human Future in the New Frontier of Power, Harvard Business School’s Shoshana Zuboff says that “you’re the product if these companies aren’t paying you for your data” does not state the case powerfully enough. She argues that the big tech platforms are like elephant poachers and our personal data like those elephants’ ivory tusks. “You are not the product,” she writes. “You are the abandoned carcass.”

Smart City initiatives also provide a way to think about “the value of our data” in the context of our living and working and not merely as the gateway to more convenient shopping, more addictive gaming experiences or “free” search engines like Googles’.

This post is adapted from my March 24, 2019 newsletter. Subscribe today and receive an email copy of future posts in your inbox each week.

New Starting Blocks for the Future of Work

March 10, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As a challenging future rushes towards us, I often wonder whether our democratic values will continue to provide a sound enough foundation for our lives and work.

In many ways, this “white-water world” is already here. As framed by John Seely Brown in a post last summer, it confronts us with knowledge that’s simply “too big to know” and a globe-spanning web of interconnections that seems to constantly alter what’s in front of us, like the shifting views of a kaleidoscope.

It’s a brave new world that:

– makes a fool out of the concept of mastery in all areas except our ability–or inability–to navigate [its] turbulent waters successfully;

– requires that we work in more playful and less pre-determined ways in an effort to keep up with the pace of change and harness it for a good purpose;

– demands workplaces where the process of learning allows the tinkerer in all of us “to feel safe” from getting it wrong until we begin to get it right;

– calls on us to treat technology as a toolbox for serving human needs as opposed to the needs of states and corporations alone; and finally,

– requires us to set aside time for reflection “outside of the flux” so that we can consider the right and wrong of where we’re headed, commit to what we value, and return to declare those values in the rough and tumble of our work tomorrow.

In the face of these demands, the most straightforward question is whether we will be able to safeguard our personal wellbeing and continue to enjoy a prosperous way of life. Unfortunately, neither of these objectives seems as readily attainable as they once did.

When our democratic values (such as freedom and championing individual rights) no longer ensure our wellbeing and prosperity, those values get questioned and eventually challenged in our politics.

Last week, I wrote here about the dangerous risks—like addiction and behavioral modification—that our kids and others confront by spending too much screen time playing on-line games like Fortnite. Despite a crescendo of anecdotal evidence about the harms to boys in particular, the freedom-loving (and endlessly distracted) West seems stymied when it comes to deciding what to do about it. On the other hand, China easily moved from identifying the harm to its collective wellbeing to implementing time restrictions on the amount of on-line play. It was the Great Firewall’s ability to intervene quickly that prompted one observer to wonder how those of us in the so-called “first world” will respond to “the spectacle of a civilisation founded [like China’s] on a very different package of values — but one that can legitimately claim to promote human flourishing more vigorously than their own”?

Meanwhile, in a Wall Street Journal essay last weekend, its authors documented the ability of authoritarian countries with capitalist economies to raise the level of prosperity enjoyed by their citizens in recent years. Not so long ago, the allure of West to the “second” and “third worlds” was that prosperity seemed to go hand-in-hand with democratic values and institutions. That conclusion is far less clear today. With rising prosperity in authoritarian nations like China and Vietnam—and the likelihood that there will soon be far more prosperous citizens in these countries than outside of them—the authors fretted that:

It isn’t clear how well democracy, without every material advantage on its side, will fare in the competition [between our very different value systems.]

With growing uncertainty about whether Western values and institutions can produce sufficient benefits for its citizens, and with “the white-water world” where we live and work challenging our navigational skills, it seems a good time to return to some questions that we’ve chewed on here before about “how we can best get ready for the challenges ahead of us.”

Can the ways that we educate our kids (and retrain ourselves) enable us to proclaim our humanity, secure our self-worth, and continue to find a valued place for ourselves in the increasingly complex world of work?

Can championing new teaching methods strengthen democratic values and deliver more of their promise to us in terms of wellbeing and prosperity than it seems we can count on today?

Are new and different classrooms the keys to our futures?

1. You Treasure What You Measure

Until this week, I never considered that widely administered education tests would provide any of these answers—but I probably should have—because in a very real way, we treasure the aptitudes and skills, indeed everything that we take the time to measure. Gross national product, budget and trade deficits, unemployment rates, the 1% versus everyone else: what is most important to us is endlessly calculated, publicized and analyzed. We also value these measures because they help us decide what to do next, like stimulating the economy, cutting government programs, or implementing trade restrictions. Measures influence actions.

It’s much the same with the measures we obtain from the educational tests that we administer, and in this regard, no test today is more influential than the Programme for International Student Assessment or PISA. PISA was first given in 2000 in 32 countries, the first time that national education systems were evaluated and could be compared with one another. The test measured 15-year-olds scholastic performance in mathematics, science and reading. No doubt you’ve heard some of the results, including the United States’ disappointing placement in the middle of the international pack. The test is given every three years and in 2018, 79 countries and economies participated in the testing and data collection.

According to an article in on-line business journal Quartz this week, “the results…are studied by educators the way soccer fans obsess over the World Cup draw.”

No one thinks more about the power of the PISA test, the information that it generates, and what additional feats it might accomplish than Andreas Schleicher, a German data scientist who heads the education division of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which administers PISA worldwide.

Schleicher downplays the role that the PISA has played in shaming low performing countries, preferring the test’s role in mobilizing national leaders to care as much about teaching and learning as they do about economic measures like unemployment rates and workplace productivity. At the most basic level, PISA data has supported a range of conclusions, including that class size seems largely irrelevant to the learning experience and that what matters most in the classroom is “the quality of teachers, who need to be intellectually challenged, trusted, and have room for professional growth.”

Schleicher also views the PISA as a tool for liberating the world’s educational systems from their single-minded focus on subjects like science, reading and math and towards the kinds of “complex, interdisciplinary skills and mindsets” that are necessary for success in the future of work. We are afraid that human jobs will be automated but we are still teaching people to think like machines. “What we know is that the kinds of things that are easy to teach, and maybe easy to test, are precisely the kinds of things that are easy to digitize and to automate,” Schleicher says.

To help steer global education out of this rut, he has pushed for the design and administration of new, optional tests that complement the PISA. Change the parameters of the test, change the skills that are measured, and maybe the world’s education-based priorities will change too. Says Schleicher: “[t]he advent of AI [or artificial intelligence] should push us to think harder [about] what makes us human” and lead us to teach to those qualities, adding that if we are not careful, the world’s nations will be continue to educate “second-class robots and not first-class humans.”

Schleicher had this future-oriented focus years before the PISA was initially administered.

In 1997, Schleicher convened a group of representatives from OECD countries, not to discuss what could be tested, but what should be tested. The idea was to move beyond thinking about education as the driver of purely economic outcomes. In addition to wanting a country’s education system to provide a ready workforce, they also wondered whether they could nurture young people to help to make their societies more cohesive and democratic while reducing unfairness and inequality. According to Quartz:

The group identified three areas to explore: relational, or how we get along with others; self, how we regulate our emotions and motivate ourselves, and content, what schools need to teach.

Instead of simply enabling students to respond to the demands of a challenging world, Schleicher and others in his group wanted national testing to encourage the kinds of skill building that would enable young people to change the world they’d be entering for the better.

Towards this end, Schleicher’s team began to develop assessments for independent thinking and the kinds of personal skills that contribute to it. The technology around test administration enabled the testers to see how students solved problems in real time, not simply whether they get them right or wrong. They gathered and shared data that enabled national education systems to “help students learn better and teachers teach better and schools to become more effective.” Assessments of the skill sets around independent thinking encouraged countries to begin to see new possibilities and want to change how students learn in their classrooms. “If you don’t have a north star [like this], perhaps you limit your vision,” he says.

For the past twenty years, Schleicher’s north stars have also included students’ quest to find meaning in what they are doing and to exercise their agency in determining what and how they learn. He is convinced that people have the “capacity to imagine and build things of intrinsic positive worth.” We have skills that robots cannot replace, like managing between black and white, integrating knowledge, and applying knowledge in unique situations. All of those skills can be tested (and encouraged), along with the skill that is most unique about human beings, namely:

our capacity to take responsibility, to mobilize our cognitive and social and emotional resources to do something that is of benefit to society.

What Schleicher and his testing visionaries began to imagine in 1997 have been gradually introduced as optional tests that focus on problem-solving, collaborative problem-solving, and most recently, so-called “global competencies” like open-mindedness and the desire to improve the world. In 2021, another optional test will assess flexibility in thinking and habits of creativity, like being inquisitive and persistent.

One knowledgeable observer of these initiatives, Douglas Archibald, credits Schleicher with “dramatically elevating” the discussion about the future of education. “There is no one else bringing together people in charge of these educational systems to seriously think about how their systems [can be] future proofed,” says Archibald. But he and others also see a hard road ahead for Schleicher, with plenty of resistance from within the global education community.

Some claim that he is asking more from a test than he should. Others claim his emphasis is fostering an over-reliance on testing over other priorities. Regarding the “global competencies” assessment for example, 40 of the 79 participating countries opted not to administer it. But Schleicher, much like visionaries in other fields, remains undaunted. Nearly half of the countries are exercising their option to assess “global competencies” and even more are administering the other optional tests that Schleicher has helped develop. Maybe educators are slowly becoming convinced that the threat to human work in a white-water world is too serious to be ignored any longer.

A view from Kenneth Robinson’s presentation: “Changing Education Paradigms”

While Schleicher and his allies are in the vanguard of those who are using a test to prompt a revolution in education, they are hardly the only ones to challenge a teaching model that, for far too long, has only sought to produce a dependable, efficient and easily replaceable workforce. The slide above is from Sir Kenneth Robinson’s much-heralded (and well-worth your taking a look at) 2010 video called “Changing Education Paradigms.” In it, he also champions teaching that enables uniquely human contributions that no machine can ever replace.

Schleicher, Robinson and others envision education systems that prepare young people (or re-engineer older ones) for a complex and ever shifting world where no one has to be overwhelmed by the glut of information or the dynamics of shifting networks but can learn how to navigate today’s challenges productively. They highlight and, by doing so, champion teaching methods that help to prepare all of us for jobs that provide meaning and a sense of wellbeing while amplifying and valuing our uniquely human contributions.

Schleicher is also helping to modify our behavior by championing skills like curiosity about others and empathy that can make us more engaged members of our communities and commit us to improving them. Assessing these skills in national education tests says both loudly and clearly that these skills are important for human flourishing too. Indeed, this may be Schleicher’s and OECD’s most significant contribution. Their international testing is encouraging the skills and changes in behavior that can build better societies, whether they are based on the democratic values of the West or the more collective and less individual ones of the East.

That is no small thing. No small thing at all.

This post is adapted from my March 10, 2019 newsletter.

Whose Values Will Save Us From Our Technology?

March 3, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When travelers visited indigenous people in remote places, they often had problems when they took out their cameras and wanted to take some pictures. The locals frequently turned away, in what was later explained as a fear of having their souls stolen by the camera’s image.

After all, who wants to let a stranger take your soul away?

Indigenous people have an interesting relationship between their experience and their representations of it. The pictures here are of embroideries made by the Kuna people who live on remote islands off the coast of Panama. I don’t know what these abstractions mean to the Kuna, but I thought they might stand in here for representations of something that’s essential to them, like their souls.

Technology today is probing—with the aim of influencing, for both good and bad purposes—the most human and vital parts of us. For years, the alarm bells have been going off about the impact on our kids of video games (and more recently their on-line multi-player successors), because kids are really “each of us” at our most impressionable. Unlike many indigenous people however, most kids are blissfully unaware that somebody might be stealing something from them or that their behavior is being modified while they are busy having fun. And it’s not just kids today who become engaged and vulnerable to those behind their screens whenever they’re playing, shopping or exploring on-line.

Because of their ability to engage and distract, the tightly controlled environments of on-line games provide behavioral scientists and the others who are watching us play them a near perfect Petri dish in which to study the choices we make in the game’s virtual world and how they can influence them. As a result of the data being gathered, the “man behind the curtain” has become increasingly adroit at deepening our engagement, anticipating our behavior once we’re “on the hook,” manipulating what we do next, and ensuring that we stay involved in the game as long as he wants us to.

Games benefit their hosts by selling stuff to players, mostly through ads and marketing play-related gear. Game hosts are also selling the behavioral information they gather from players. Their playbook is the same as Facebook’s: monetizing behavioral data about its users by selling that data to whoever wants to influence our decision-making in all aspects of our lives and work.

When it comes to gathering particularly rich pools of behavioral data, two games today are noteworthy. Fortnite has become one of the most successful games in history in what seems like a matter of months, while Tetris, one of the first on-line games, has recently been updated for an even wider demographic. This week’s stories about them illustrate the potency of their interactions with players; the precision of the existing behavioral data that these games have utilized; the even more refined behavioral data they are currently gathering on players; and the risks of addiction and other harms to the humans who are playing them.

These stories amount to a cautionary tale, affecting not just the games we play but all of our screen-facing experiences. Are we, as citizens of the enlightened, freedom-loving West, equipped to “save our souls” from these aspiring puppet-masters or is the paternalistic, more harmony-seeking East (particularly China with its great firewalls and social monitors) finding better solutions? It’s actually a fairly simple question—

Whose values will save us from our technology?

1. The Rise of Fortnite and Tetris

Five years or an on-line lifetime ago, I wrote about “social benefit games” like WeTopia, wondering whether they could enable us to exercise our abilities to act in “pro-social” or good ways on-line before we went out to change the world. I also worried at the time about the eavesdroppers behind our screens who were studying us while we did so.

I heralded their enabling quality, their potential for helping us to behave better, in a post called Game Changer:

The repetitive activities in this virtual world didn’t feel like rote learning because the over-and-over-again was embedded in the diversions of what was, at least at the front end, only a game. Playing it came with surprises (blinking “opportunities” and “limited time offers”), cheerful reminders (to water my “giving tree” or harvest my carrots), and rewards from all of the “work” I was doing (the “energy,” “experience,” and “good will” credits I kept racking up by remembering to restock Almanzo’s store or to grow my soccer-playing community of friends).

What I’m wondering is whether this kind of immersive on-line experience can change real world behavior.

We assume that the proverbial rat in this maze will learn how to press the buzzer with his little paw when the pellets keep coming.

Will he (or she) become even more motivated if he can see that a fellow rat, outside his maze, also gets pellets every time he presses his buzzer?

And what happens when he leaves the maze?

Is this really a way to prepare the shock troops needed to change the world?

In a second post, I looked at what “the man behind the curtain” was doing while the game’s players were learning how to become better people:

He’s a social scientist who has never had more real time information about how and why people behave in the ways that they do (not ever!) than he can gather today by watching hundreds, sometimes even millions of us play these kinds of social games.

Why you did one thing and not another. What activities attracted you and which ones didn’t. What set of circumstances got you to use your credit card, or to ask your friends to give you a hand, or to play for 10 hours instead of just 10 minutes.

There’s a lot for that man to learn because, quite frankly, we never act more naturally or in more revealing ways than when we’re at play.

In my last post back then, I concluded that there were both upsides and downsides to these kinds of on-line game experiences and agreed to keep an open mind. I still think so, but am far more pessimistic about the downsides today than I was all those years ago.

Fortnite may be the most widely played on-line game ever. As a hunt/kill your enemies/celebrate your victories kind of adventure, it is similar to hundreds of other on-line offerings. Like them, it has also drawn far more boys than girls as players. What distinguishes the Fortnite experience is the behavioral data that has informed it.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, “How Fortnite Triggered an Unwinnable War Between Parents and Their Boys,” the game’s success is due to the incorporation of existing behavioral data in its base programming and simultaneous machine learning while the game is afoot. Dr Richard Freed, psychologist and author of “Wired Child: Reclaiming Childhood in a Digital Age” says that Fortnite has combined so many “persuasive design elements” (around 200) that it is the talk among his peers. “Something is really different about it,” he said.

Ofir Turel who teaches at Cal State Fullerton and researches the effects of social media and gaming, talked about one of those persuasive design elements, namely how Fortnite players experience the kind of random and unpredictable rewards that keep their casino counterparts glued to their seats for hours in front of their slot machines. (Fifty years ago, behaviorist B.F. Skinner found that variable, intermittent rewards were more effective than a predictable pattern of rewards in shaping the habit-forming behavior of pigeons.) “When you follow a reward system that’s not fixed, it messes up our brains eventually,” said Turel. With games like Fortnite, he continues: “We’re all pigeons in a big human experiment.”

The impact of these embedded and evolving forms of persuasion were certainly compelling for the boys who are profiled in this article. Toby is a representative kid who wants to play all of the time and whose behavior seems to have changed as a result:

Toby is ‘typically a nice kid,’ his mother said. He is sweet, articulate, creative, precocious and headstrong—the kind of child who can be a handful but whose passion and curiosity could well drive him to greatness. [In other words, the perfect Wall Street Journal reader’s pre-teen.]

Turn off Fortnite [however], and he can scream, yell and call his parents names. Toby gets so angry that his parents impose ‘cooling off’ periods of as long as two weeks. His mother said he becomes less aggressive during those times. The calming effect wears off after Fortnite returns.

Toby’s mother has tried to reason with him. She has also threatened boarding school. ‘We’re not emotionally equipped to live like this,’ she tells him. ‘This is too intense for the other people living here.’

Of course, it could be years before psychologists and other researchers study larger samples of boys playing Fortnite and report their findings.

In the meantime, there was also a story about Tetris in the newspapers this week. Some of you may remember the game from the era of Pokeman. (Essentially, you attempt to navigate blocks or clusters of blocks into the spaces in a container on the screen below, where you drop them in.) How could a simple, time consuming, 1980’s era diversion like this be harmful, you ask? This time it seems to embed an endless desire for distraction instead of aggression.

A 1994 article in Wired magazine identified something called “the Tetris Effect.” Long after they had played the game, many players reported seeing floating blocks in their minds or imaging real-life objects fitting together. At the time, Wired suggested that the game’s effect on the brain made it a kind of “electronic drug” or “pharmatronic.” The random sample of players in this week’s article added further descriptors to the Tetris Effect.

One player named Becky Noback says:

You get the dopamine rush from stacking things up in a perfect order and having them disappear—all that classic Tetris satisfaction. It’s like checking off a to-do list. It gives you this sense of accomplishment.

Another player, Jeremy Ricci, says:

When everything’s clicking, and you’re dropping your pieces, you get into this trancelike rhythm. It’s hard to explain, but when you’re in virtual-reality mode, there’s things going beneath you, and to the side of you, and the music changes, and you’re getting all those elements at the same time, you get a surreal experience.

The article recounts that a Twitter search of both “Tetris Effect” and “cry” or “tears” will uncover tweets where players are wondering: “Why am I tearing up during a Tetris game?” testifying to the game’s deep emotional resonance. Reviewers of the newest version of the game (out in December) have also called it “spiritual,” “transcendental,” and “an incredible cosmic journey.”

What is prompting these reactions? While the basic game is the same as ever, the newest version surrounds the block-dropping action with fantastical environments, ambient new age music, and, occasionally, a soothing lyric like “what could you be afraid of?” Add virtual reality goggles, and a player can float in space surrounded by stars while luminescent jellyfish flutter by and mermaids morph into dolphins. When a player drops in his or her blocks, the audio pulses gently and the hand-held controller vibrates. While the new version of the game may seem aimed at seekers of “trippy experiences,” in fact it is being marketed as an immersive stress-relieving diversion. It is here where Tetris aims for a market beyond the usually game-playing crowd, which skews younger and more male. (Think of all those new pigeons!). Almost everyone wants a stress reliever after all.

You can see a preview of the new Tetris for yourself (with or without your virtual reality headsets) via this link.

These early assessments of Fortnite and Tetris only provide anecdotal evidence, but we seem to be entering a strange new world where a game’s interface and those gathering information and manipulating our behavior behind it have taken over more of our attention, healthy detachment, and ability to think for ourselves.

Another one from the Kuna people, San Blas Islands, Panama

2. Go East or Go West?

In “Fortnite Addiction: China Has the Answer,” David Mattin discusses China’s assessment of the problem, the solution that its social monitors are implementing today, and why their approach just might make sense for us too. Mattin is the Global Head of Trends and Insights (a great job title!) at TrendWatching and sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council. He put up his provocative post on Medium recently.

It’s been widely reported that China is rolling out what Mattin calls “an unprecedented, tech-fueled experiment in surveillance and social control.” Under this system, citizens are assigned a “social credit rating” that scores each citizen’s worth as a citizen. It is a system that seems shocking to us in the West, but it follows centuries of maintaining a social order based on respect for elders (from the “celestial kingdom of rulers” on down) and a quest for harmony in the community as a whole. The Chinese government intends to have a compulsory rating system in place nationwide by 2020. Individuals with low social credit scores have already been denied commercial loans, building permits and school admissions. Mattin reports that low scorers have also been blocked from taking 11.4 million flights and 4.2 million train rides. This system is serious about limiting personal freedoms for the sake of collective well being.

Like many of us, China’s monitors have become alarmed by reports of Fortnite addiction and Tencent, the world’s sixth largest internet company, recently started using camera-enabled facial recognition technology to restrict the amount of time that young people play a multi-player video game called Honor of Kings that’s similar to Fortnite. As in the West, the concern is about the impact of these gaming technologies on young people’s developing brains and life prospects.

Under government pressure, Tencent first trialled the new system back in October. Now they’ve announced they’ll implement facial recognition-based age restrictions on all their games in 2019. Under 12s will be locked out after one hour per day; 13–18-year olds are allowed two hours. And here’s the crucial detail: the system is fuelled by the national citizen database held by China’s Ministry of Public Security. Yes, if you’re playing Honor of Kings in China now, you’re being watched via your webcam or phone camera and checked against a vast government database of headshots.

Because we can’t imagine it happening here doesn’t mean it’s the wrong approach, and in the most interesting part of his argument, Mattin partially explains why.

He begins with the observation that priorities in Chinese society and the trade-offs they’re making are different—something that’s hard (if not impossible) for most of us Westerners, overtaken by our feelings of superiority, to understand.

– “Enlightenment liberal values are not the only way to produce a successful society” and

– “value judgments are trade-offs; you can have a bit more of one good if you tolerate having a bit less of another.”

Indeed, it is how all ethical systems work; some values are always more important than others in decision-making. Mattin drives his point home this way:

What western liberal democrats have never had to countenance seriously is the idea that theirs are not the only values mandated by reason and morality; that they’re not the universal end point of history and the destination for all successful societies. In fact, they’re just some values among many others that are equally valid. And choosing between ultimate values is always a case of trading some off against others.

Mattin rubs it in even further with an uncomfortable truth and a question for additional pondering.

For us, as the supposed champions of freedom and the rights of every individual, the uncomfortable truth is that every single day “we’re actively deciding (albeit unconsciously) that we hold other values — such as convenience and distraction — above that of individual liberty.” So it is not really government interference with our freedoms that we reject; it is anyone else’s right to interfere with our convenience or right to be distracted as much as we want anytime that we want. Of course, I’ve been making a similar argument when urging that new restraints be placed on tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google. However uncomfortable it is to hear, our insatiable desires for convenience and distraction are simply not more important than preventing the harms these companies are causing to our political process, privacy rights, and competitive markets. Even so, in the U.S. at least, we seem to making very little progress in any of these areas because we supposedly stand for freedom.

Mattin’s what-if question to mull over is as follows. What if the evidence mounts that excessive screen time playing games and otherwise really is damaging young people’s (or maybe everyone’s) minds and that China’s government-imposed time restrictions really do limit the damage? How will the West respond to “the spectacle of a civilisation founded on a very different package of values — but one that can legitimately claim to promote human flourishing more vigorously than their own”?

3. Whose Values Should Help Us To Decide?

I have a few additional questions of my own.

If empowering a Big Brother (or Sister) like China’s in the West is unpalatable, how can a distracted public that is preoccupied by its conveniences be roused enough to counter tech-related harms with democratically determined cures?

Do we need to be confronted by an epidemic of anti-social gamers before we act? Since an epidemic of opioid addiction and “deaths of despair” hasn’t roused the citizenry (or its elected representatives) to initiate a meaningful response, why would it be any different here?

Even if we had The Will to pursue solutions, could safety nets ever be put into place quickly enough to protect the generations that are playing Fortnite, Tetris and other games today? After all, democracy is cumbersome, time-consuming.

And continuing this thought, can democratic governments ever hope to “catch up to” and protect their citizens from rapidly evolving and improving technologies with troubling human impacts? Won’t the men and women behind our screens always be ahead of a non-authoritarian government’s ability to constrain them?

I hope you’ll let me know what you think the answers might be.

This post is adapted from my March 3, 2019 newsletter.

How Can We Hold Our Common Ground?

February 17, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Our relationships at work are harmed when we disagree with others and experience their convictions as an assault on what we believe is right and true.

Without basic trust—along with at least some beliefs and convictions that we hold in common—it becomes almost impossible to move forward with our co-workers productively, but:

– How can I be confident in somebody’s judgments at work when their judgments in politics are so offensive?

– How could I ever collaborate with, even be friends with, somebody I disagree with so fundamentally?

– If, as has been repeatedly demonstrated, the most productive meetings and collaborations are comprised of people with divergent opinions who are both willing and able to declare them, then how can the right people ever come together and accomplish anything worthwhile when (deep down) they distrust and often loathe what those who disagree with them stand for?

– What must members of a group share with one another in order to disagree deeply yet not fall into disarray while doing so?

– How can those who fall on different sides of the most divisive issues still be friends, collaborators, co-workers, or citizens who remain able to fight for the same future together?

– How small can their common ground be and still be enough?

These are the questions that two prominent teachers, who happen to stand on opposite ends of the political divide, have been asking when they come together.

A Conversation with Cornel West and Robert George on Friendship and Faith Across Political Differences – February 8, 2019

And it wasn’t just this joint appearance. Cornel West and Robert George have been on a road show talking about their friendship, their profound differences, and their common ground for several years now.

I overheard one of their conversations for the first time in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year. In it, they made a radical suggestion. In order to gain an ethical perspective on any issue, try to imagine (and then follow through on) whatever Martin Luther King would have done under the same circumstances. I was moved enough by it that it became the subject of a newsletter I called “Trying on a Hero’s Perspective.”

Well they were at it again at Duke a couple of Fridays ago, and a video of their hour-long talk (with another half-hour of follow-up questions) came on-line last week. If you’re interested in spending a fascinating hour, you can safely start the recording at the half hour-mark following their voluminous greetings—but make sure and stay tuned through the questions at the end.

I hope the following summary of their remarks peaks your interest in listening to what West and George actually said that night as they gestured towards the “thin” foundation of commonality we all share and need to preserve; the kind of person you’ll need to be in order to champion it; and some additional ways that you can go about doing so.

1. A Thin Foundation of Commonality

At the beginning of their conversation, George wonders:

How thin a basic set of shared values can you have and still share enough to have a relationship where you can disagree and still have a friendship?

Of course, his first answer was reflected in his longstanding friendship with Cornel West.

George then reminds us that America never became a nation because we had the same ethnicity or religion but because we shared “a political set of values,” as both Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King reminded us during two of the most divisive periods in our history. George believes that we do share enough “to flourish in our pluralism,” but that there are serious dangers too, and we are seeing many of the warning signs today. We always “wrap emotions around our convictions to get things done”—and wouldn’t accomplish anything if we didn’t—but when those emotions are “wrapped too tightly” we become dogmatic, identifying too closely with our beliefs. We experience any challenge to our convictions “as a personal assault” which separates us from one another while creating hostility. Because of these tendencies, every pluralistic society rests on very thin ice.

It is not just America. George talks about the Hutus and Tutsis living together peacefully in Rwanda for many years until leaders enflamed local rivalries and friendly co-existence devolved into mass murder. George has a Syrian parent and visited his family’s home village in Syria a decade ago when Christians and Muslims were living and working together peacefully until it too turned into “a genocidal nightmare.” He reminds us that in democracies in particular, “civic friendship is very fragile,” and that whenever that friendship is lost, democracy tends to be replaced by tyranny.

Cornel West picked up the theme by rejecting both Plato’s and Dostoevsky’s views on society in favor of a vision that was championed by America’s Founding Fathers. Plato argued that the public was too emotional and ignorant to sustain a more inclusive form of governance, while Dostoevsky was convinced that most individuals don’t want to be free, preferring “pied pipers” to lead them and “magic” to amuse them. Instead, America’s founders believed that citizens could rise to the occasion and govern themselves because of basic principles they shared, memorializing this common ground in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine also knew that “If you don’t renew the democratic possibilities, you are going to lose them.”

In their conversation at Duke, neither George nor West describe the foundation that needs continuous renewal beyond their reference to America’s founding, but they do address key aspects of it elsewhere. “Truth Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression-A Statement by Robert P. George and Cornel West” is a statement of principles which they published (and asked other concerned Americans to sign onto) in March of 2017. It is a key part of their joint effort to renew our democratic possibilities so that there continues to be “enough” of a foundation to support our civic friendship. This is a link if you wish to add your signature to it. (Please drop me a line if you do!) And here is their statement in full:

The pursuit of knowledge and the maintenance of a free and democratic society require the cultivation and practice of the virtues of intellectual humility, openness of mind, and, above all, love of truth. These virtues will manifest themselves and be strengthened by one’s willingness to listen attentively and respectfully to intelligent people who challenge one’s beliefs and who represent causes one disagrees with and points of view one does not share.

That’s why all of us should seek respectfully to engage with people who challenge our views. And we should oppose efforts to silence those with whom we disagree—“especially on college and university campuses. As John Stuart Mill taught, a recognition of the possibility that we may be in error is a good reason to listen to and honestly consider—and not merely to tolerate grudgingly—points of view that we do not share, and even perspectives that we find shocking or scandalous. What’s more, as Mill noted, even if one happens to be right about this or that disputed matter, seriously and respectfully engaging people who disagree will deepen one’s understanding of the truth and sharpen one’s ability to defend it.

None of us is infallible. Whether you are a person of the left, the right, or the center, there are reasonable people of goodwill who do not share your fundamental convictions. This does not mean that all opinions are equally valid or that all speakers are equally worth listening to. It certainly does not mean that there is no truth to be discovered. Nor does it mean that you are necessarily wrong. But they are not necessarily wrong either. So someone who has not fallen into the idolatry of worshiping his or her own opinions and loving them above truth itself will want to listen to people who see things differently in order to learn what considerations—evidence, reasons, arguments—led them to a place different from where one happens, at least for now, to find oneself.

All of us should be willing—even eager—to engage with anyone who is prepared to do business in the currency of truth-seeking discourse by offering reasons, marshaling evidence, and making arguments. The more important the subject under discussion, the more willing we should be to listen and engage—especially if the person with whom we are in conversation will challenge our deeply held—even our most cherished and identity-forming—beliefs.

It is all-too-common these days for people to try to immunize from criticism opinions that happen to be dominant in their particular communities. Sometimes this is done by questioning the motives and thus stigmatizing those who dissent from prevailing opinions; or by disrupting their presentations; or by demanding that they be excluded from campus or, if they have already been invited, disinvited. Sometimes students and faculty members turn their backs on speakers whose opinions they don’t like or simply walk out and refuse to listen to those whose convictions offend their values. Of course, the right to peacefully protest, including on campuses, is sacrosanct. But before exercising that right, each of us should ask: Might it not be better to listen respectfully and try to learn from a speaker with whom I disagree? Might it better serve the cause of truth-seeking to engage the speaker in frank civil discussion?

Our willingness to listen to and respectfully engage those with whom we disagree (especially about matters of profound importance) contributes vitally to the maintenance of a milieu in which people feel free to speak their minds, consider unpopular positions, and explore lines of argument that may undercut established ways of thinking. Such an ethos protects us against dogmatism and groupthink, both of which are toxic to the health of academic communities and to the functioning of democracies.

Once again, by regularly appearing together George and West are actually demonstrating the same civic friendship that they are championing in this statement.

2. The qualities we’ ll all need more of to help renew our democratic possibilities

Several of these qualities can be inferred from the statement above (such as intellectual modesty), but at Duke, George and West made several additional observations, particularly in the Q&A.

George begins with the importance of cultivating friendships with those who have different perspectives. But he also reminds us that when you do, you are leaving the conformity of those who are “most like you,” meaning that you will also need the courage of your free will to speak the truth as you see it. When you leave the comfort of your fellow travelers, it helps to have role models, including those whose courage has carried them to the point of martyrdom. He also acknowledges that you’ll need “a few others to hold you up” when you champion what you believe and encounter the hostility that is the most likely response.

For his part, West characterizes those with the necessary courage as being “more revolutionary,” noting that you must be “willing to bear your cross” which “signifies your quest to unarm truth and unapologetically love” those who vehemently disagree with you. He continues: “to be a polished professional usually means don’t get too close to that cross” because what is most important to you is wanting to conform to those who are most like you. But when you are willing to bear that cross and become a revolutionary, you need to know that you are also on your way to character assassination or (like Lincoln and King) literal assassination.

Embodying the courage, loneliness and pain that George and West were describing, one of the night’s three questioners was a Christian Palestinian woman from Israel whose involvement in the peace movement there has been regularly vilified by Christians, Muslims, Jews, Israelis and Palestinians. While George and West were embodying civic friendship, she embodied the pain that goes into finding it.

3. How to find a patch of green where civic friendship can grow

George and West give several examples, including these:

– When pursuing civic friendship with those who vehemently disagree with you, it is essential to decide which truths are negotiable for you and which are non-negotiable. For the Palestinian-Israeli peace activist, one non-negotiable truth is that every Palestinian baby deserves to live. When the ice is this thin, nothing is too basic to be left unsaid.

– Within Christianity, it is possible to harbor an intense hatred for a person’s sin while, at the same time, recognizing that his or her sins do not exhaust that sinner’s humanity. To similar effect, however odious a person’s convictions, they never rob that person of his or her essential dignity and integrity. Hate the sin but not the sinner. As West observed: we “must recognize the limitations but always hold out the possibility of transcending them” in the course of our civic conversations.

– To follow those possibilities even further, a person’s conviction always “lives” within a broader context or set of circumstances and is rarely either good or bad in spite of those circumstances. When you take the time to understand the context where another’s convictions arise, it is often possible to recognize how differences between you arose, agree to disagree, and step down from your mutual hostility. West illustrates this point by reference to our current divisions over “black face,” recalling that its original context suggests a kind of appropriation of black power by white slaveholders who wanted to have some of that power for themselves. In other words, “black face” was about attraction and not merely ridicule and oppression. Where there might be some “overlap” between positions within a particular context—that is, a more hopeful ground between those who are for and against a particular issue—there exists the possibility for civic conversation and even friendship.

I think you’ll enjoy the Robert George-Cornel West conversation at Duke when you get to hear it. I’d also recommend that you follow their road show as it winds its way across an America that is likely to grow even more divided as another presidential election approaches.

The unfortunate truth is that our divisions are never confined to the realm of politics. As hostility intensifies, it infects our work and leaches into our home lives.

The best way to champion common ground is by acting with the courageous belief that common ground is possible, that democracy is worth renewing, and that its renewal won’t begin with somebody else.

This post is adapted from my February 17, 2019 newsletter.