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.

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.

How Can We Hold Our Common Ground?

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