From the TV remote to the group text to the ghoulish glow of the tablet I should have stowed before curling into bed: The world’s abiding awfulness is always just a click away. It’s as omnipresent as the WiFi it rides like a jet stream. It leaps between fellow citizens—a furrowed brow here, passing comment there—like a pathogen, a mood.

You’re aware, I presume, of what constitutes this awfulness? Of the climate crisis, the democracy crisis, and the election that’ll put both on the line. Of rising income inequality and eroding reproductive rights. Of wars. Of everything that’s overwhelming. How it’s everywhere all at once.

How does one cope? There’s drinking (I’ve tried it) and meditation (sleep-inducing), activism (good, if exhausting) and full-on fetal surrender (that didn’t work in 2020). Lately, though, I’ve found a better treatment, something portable, something free: I think about the Earth’s geological timeline and my own tiny lifespan. I zoom out from the crises that define my era and linger on the cataclysms of the past: the dinosaur-annihilating asteroid, the reshuffling of the continents, the first human to speak.

There, in the company of cosmic devastation, today’s headlines recede. Our global sauna cools when I picture woolly mammoths trudging across my driveway. I close my eyes a little longer, and a glacier glows in a living room where the TV speaks of war. I can even forget the faces of this nation’s villains by imagining the molten lava that once swirled across the Earth. They are ash, and I am ash, and our awful era floats away like smoke.

I like how I can access these worlds while buying groceries, commuting, or writing an email—channeling an apocalyptic Walter Mitty as I reimagine geologies where people disappear. It helps to have a reference for each scenario: Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, notes from an exhibit on fossils, a high school physics textbook. The latter led me to intergalactic finales, star systems collapsing like constellated Fourth of Julys.

Is this a by-product of an ostrich-like retreat into research, reading, and the mind? Perhaps. Let the record show, though, that I still volunteer and vote. As a poet who believes, as Whitman did before me, that poets should be their “age transfigured,” this is how I transfigure mine.

In my latest poetry collection, When the Earth Flies Into the Sun, I often linger on planetary upheavals, sussing out the solace and sublimity that such events allow. (The sublime, Rainer Maria Rilke tells us, is something so beautiful it threatens to destroy us.) Each poem, I hope, distills my peculiar treatment into a tincture. They’re aspirin. They’re escape.

That’s how I found myself imagining, in the book’s title poem, what happens when the Earth finally flies into the sun. The answer: “it will be morning every day.” Other scenarios followed on the page after a short audition in the mind. In a poem first published here at Zócalo Public Square, I write to the first human speaker. In a sequel, I address the last human on earth:

Your end in the end          will come before dawn:

the sun’s just a sun—       your shadow alone will know            that you’re gone.

In the undiscoverable history of human figuration, the sun, I like to think, precipitated our first metaphors. Our shadows, by the same logic, the first personification. As a writer always working to coin new metaphors, I take a perverse pleasure in imagining their extinction. The sun, once again, is “just a sun.” What else tells us that the Anthropocene has come to an end?

Imagination is an asset at such moments of crisis. There’s no hope without it, nor any social justice. Whoever endeavors to change the world must first imagine it anew. But it’s also a balm when those crises overwhelm. In 1942, as the magnitude of awfulness exceeded even our own, the poet Wallace Stevens described his vocation like so: “to help people to live their lives.” Poets achieved this by making their imagination “the light in the minds of others.”

In the oubliette of my insomnia or the shudder of another mass shooting, I try to do the same. I hunch over my desk; I scratch a few lines into my notebook. If I’m lucky, imagination fills a poem’s paper lantern, and—years later, revisions complete—it floats into the world. If I’m not, I can seek solace in one of the many poetry books scattered across the room.

I’m not alone in this second, readerly desire, as recent catastrophes attest. In the months following the attacks of 9/11, W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” attained a sort of pre-viral fame. It helped that the poem opened its lament where so many Americans ended their day: at a bar feeling “[u]ncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” The repugnant Muslim travel ban of 2017 returned many readers to Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus.” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine compelled me to recite Adam Zagajewski’s “To Go to Lvov” to my students.

These poems provide a necessary reassurance. That the world has broken before. That we’ve jigsawed it back into shape. Poetry’s marginality—roughly 12% of Americans read it—also suits it to moments of crisis. Now is the time for elevated speech, some part of the populace concedes, because we’ve already tried everything else. Devices, drink, distraction, debate: None provide, as poems do, the hand at the small of one’s back, the rain that cools in the fall.

I used to think that poets had superpowers. That they could lick a finger, hold it up to the wind, and tune into the suffering of the world. But I have come to believe that we’re all capable of registering the world’s suffering. The question that lingers is what to do next. For me, this entails imagining geological sweeps of rock and species, stars and shore. These provide me—and, I hope, whatever readers join me—a detached sort of peace.

The post When the World Seems Awful, I Submerge Myself in the Vastness of the Universe appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Several weeks ago, we convened a group of Muslims and Jews in our network to talk about the unrelenting pain we have been experiencing on, before, and after October 7, 2023, when everything that was already so broken in Israel-Palestine became exponentially broken.

It was days after the discovery of six Israeli hostages shot dead just before their captors fled. “I feel like I am mourning for Hersh [Goldberg-Polin]. I feel like I knew him,” said Ryan, who is Muslim. His grief was palpable. Deeply authentic. His words hung heavy in the air.

Then after a breath, he continued with equal weight, “And I can’t help wondering how many Palestinian Hershs have also been killed, along with all of the life and potential that lay ahead for them.”

With that breath, and what came before and after, Ryan modeled the full human compassion that has been counterintuitive for so many over the past 12 months:

Palestinian lives are grievable. Full stop.

Israeli lives are grievable. Full stop.

Full “Yes.” Full “And.”

In the words of Hersh’s mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, “The time has come to be human.” She was exhorting negotiators and national leaders on CNN, but this holds true for all of us. As scared, infuriated, and desperate as we may feel right now, we need to remember that our fates and interests are intertwined. If we cannot find one another’s humanity, we risk our collective future.

We have worked together over several decades at NewGround, a Los Angeles-based organization that empowers Muslims and Jews to bridge divides that threaten both our communities’ well-being and our fragile democracy. This past year, we and our staff have convened diverse groups of Angelenos around the most difficult questions of this moment—from “Does the phrase ‘From the River to the Sea’ mean the elimination of Israel—or of Jews?” to “Is Israel committing genocide of Palestinians?”—in a space where holding on to one another’s humanity is possible. Our network includes Jews, Muslims, and at times people from other faith communities, some with deep connections to Israel and Palestine, some without personal connections at all. We know that the conflict in Israel-Palestine is political and that there are always religious overtones to it, and we know that not all Palestinians are Muslim and that not all Israeli citizens are Jewish. Nevertheless, no one in the NewGround network has been left untouched by the impact of the violence there and the polarization here.

And the hardest part has been trying to help even our own people to resist the dehumanization of one group or another. Our brains are wired to homogenize people we perceive as outside our “tribe”—a tendency that increases dramatically in high conflict.

We see how hard it is for some Jews, Israelis, and others to imagine Palestinians as parents who love their children. And how demoralizing it is for Muslims and Palestinians to have to prove their humanity at this most basic level. Muslims find themselves asking questions like, “How can killing 200 Palestinians to rescue four Israelis be justified?”

We see how difficult it is for some Muslims, especially Palestinians, and others deeply concerned for them, to see individual Israelis as anything other than evil aggressors. Jews and Israelis find themselves wondering, “How can you not see mothers taken from children, children taken from parents, people who have been working toward peace killed in homes and fields?”

Interests coming from many directions have been working overtime to convince us that only one group or the other has humanity and value. This is especially difficult terrain to navigate for individuals who have direct personal experience and trauma connected to one side or the other.

In the conversations we convene at NewGround, we strive to create conditions that help people share their pain and perspectives authentically—giving them the resilience to witness the pain of others, who can then, in turn, soften and open themselves to a wider range of perspectives. We pose hard questions where we know there are big differences, then ask people to stand on a spectrum of agreement and disagreement before speaking to why they chose to stand where they did. Or we might do a fishbowl exercise, inviting Muslim and Jewish participants to create two concentric circles, both facing inward. The outer circle listens—not talking—as members of the inner circle—either Muslim or Jewish—speak one-by-one and in discussion, in response to a hot question. When the first conversation concludes, the circles switch places. Afterward, the whole group talks. Working with a heterogenous group of Jews and of Muslims, at times with other faith communities present, ensures that participants can better grasp all that is at stake, rather than remaining in binary thinking.

It takes discipline to process our own pain, create space for our tears to flow instead of suppressing them, and care for the pain of others. It takes humility, especially amidst deep vulnerability, to say, “I don’t always understand, but I know I need to.” We continue to rededicate ourselves to holding tight to values expressed in both traditions: Each life is an entire world, and kindness and justice must walk hand in hand. It’s beyond challenging and yet it is essential.

Truly rehumanizing one another’s people requires recognizing specific lives lived and lost, not merely speaking of a generalized “suffering” of one group. Knowing people’s names and who they might have become in the world. Describing the hell in which people are continuing to live. Understanding that neither of our communities are monoliths.

So we remember the death and life of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, whose final interview with CNN was broadcast, per his request, only after he was killed on December 7, 2023. In the interview, he described the feelings of despair as a parent powerless to protect his children. Unimaginable calculations such as: “How can you hug your child so as not to scare them with what might feel like a ‘farewell hug’?” “Should we sleep in the same room so that if we die, we die together, or divide into two rooms in case some of the family might survive?”

And we remember the death and life of Israeli peacemaker Vivian Silver, who was killed on October 7. Hiding in her home’s safe room on Kibbutz Be’eri, Vivian—angry at being forced to articulate a one-sided position—argued with a radio interviewer. “If I survive, then we will have a deep and complex conversation about two sides,” she told him. Her son, Yonatan Zeigen, is now engaged in peacebuilding full-time, and recently shared how moved he was to learn that a soup kitchen had been set up in Gaza in his mother’s name because of the relationships she forged with people there.

We are working hard, and against the grain, to expand the capacity for our people—and those beyond our network—to hold all this humanity and all this loss together. It takes courage and strength to look at someone else’s pain when you are in deep pain yourself. Especially when it feels threatening to do so because you know their pain is being used by others to delegitimize your own.

We learned from the late neuroscientist Emile Bruneau that dehumanization builds in the gap between excess empathy for one group, and lack of empathy for the other. His findings on empathy and conflict resolution have helped us understand so much about our work in perspective building and conflict transformation. Unfortunately, at this moment, as we look out into rhetoric and actions in our broader communities, we are seeing much of what was described in his studies bearing out between our larger communities, both in Israel-Palestine and here at home. We are seeing things like triumph and glee at pagers exploding in grocery stores, or calls for all Jews to “go back to Poland.”

We know that the only antidote to this kind of dehumanization is inviting people toward rehumanizing one another. This will not stop the violence right away. But it is part of the calculus of any permanent solution to the conflict. And one powerful form of rehumanization is to grieve all of our people together, as Palestinians and Israelis do every year at a joint memorial ceremony.

In a session earlier in the year, one of our Jewish members, Eli, reminded us of the philosopher Judith Butler’s concept of “grievability.” Butler asks us to be attentive to whose pain, whose humanity is grievable, and whose isn’t. Grievability can shift depending upon the context, but it tends to fall where forces of power are concentrated. Speaking very generally, in mainstream American politics and media, Israeli lives are grievable and Palestinian lives much less so. On “the street” (including lots of social media and alternative spaces), Palestinian lives are grievable and Israeli lives much less so (and there is also a kind of power here, of a different nature). In the 2017 study “The Enemy as Animal,” Bruneau and psychologist Nour Kteily found that even in asymmetrical conflicts, symmetrical dehumanization contributes to prolonging violence.

These critical insights, along with those of civil rights scholar john a. powell, who urges us to “be hard on structures and soft on people,” remind us to acknowledge and address power imbalances and to remember that pain is pain and must also be acknowledged and addressed for us to move forward together. 

So our ask is very simple, yet extremely difficult: Seek out, listen to, and grieve one another’s stories. Even—and especially—when it is the hardest. Resist the way your anger and despair might pull you away from another’s humanity. Even righteous anger has an insatiable appetite; it can rob you of your own humanity and impact the way you become with others, including your loved ones. Re-member one another, and please remember for yourself: A key to stopping the violence permanently is to see beyond the exclusive, “us or them” view the world prefers, and expand our lens to a larger scope of dignity, security, and justice for all.   

The post Why Can’t We Grieve for All the Dead? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Bruce Springsteen was the first artist I saw in concert—in 1976, when I was 15. He had recently graced the covers of Time and Newsweek, and journalist Jon Landau, who would later become his manager, had dubbed him “the future of rock ‘n’ roll.” His early Dylan-esque reveries of streetwise characters on the margins, songs like “Sandy” and “Spirit in the Night,” felt lived-in and alive, and evoked charm and scruff. By the time he came out with 1975’s Born to Run, his music’s ever-bigger sound propelled working-class frustration and disillusionment into a high-octane overdrive of expansive dreams and open-road odysseys.

My frustrations were different: I was a lonely, awkward, self-absorbed, diffident suburban teenager, aching for a way out of myself. For me, Springsteen’s songs unlocked a liminal sweet spot between joy and fury that quickened my teenage rebellion fantasies and affirmed my angst-ridden realities.

The second time I saw Springsteen was at Madison Square Garden, in that transitory summer between high school graduation and freshman orientation. By then he was graduating too, from intimate concert spaces to cavernous ones, from Next Big Thing to bona fide rock star.

He brought a new vulnerability to his first-person confessions and laments. When he performed “Adam Raised a Cain”—a lightning-bolt-at-first-listen for me—you could picture him on his knees, pounding the floor, letting out a Brando-esque wail. He wasn’t just telling you about his fraught relationship with his father; this was primal-scream therapy. He was willing, in a room full of tens of thousands of strangers, to offer a sonic squall from the soul. This forced me to sit and listen. A catharsis of that visceral magnitude can power-drive you into silent submission. His concerts were epic transformations, doing what good art does.

As I grew—physically, emotionally, intellectually—I expanded my heart and mind to other music, other sounds, other affirmations. I hosted four different shows as a DJ at my college radio station: punk/new wave, jazz, classical, and the graveyard shift, the most freeform playground of all. I seldom, if ever, played Bruce. My musical palette broadened and deepened. His hadn’t. And while I would forever be in his debt for taking me to new places, I had moved on.

Like old friends from previous chapters in your narrative, some artists are of a certain time and place. The joyful fury and furious joy that fueled Bruce’s music lost its immediate relevance for me. But several decades later, Bruce returned—and I took notice.

In 2016, exactly 40 years after I stood in his audience at my very first concert, Springsteen published his memoir, Born to Run. The following year, as a sort of companion piece, he created and performed his one-man show, Springsteen on Broadway, which would later stream on Netflix. These works revealed to me an artist who had foraged through the attics, crawl spaces, and basements of his mind and reconstituted a life. They reminded me of the best aspects of a reunion—as a barometer of personal trajectory and an opportunity for rediscovery and recontextualization, where old friends reimagine friendships. Such became my reconnection with Bruce in my late-middle age—from a mutual place of wisdom and grace.

Media coverage around Born to Run homed in on Bruce’s description of his long battle with depression. Critics found it ironic that one who put everything he had into a four-hour offering of roof-raising exaltation would suffer from an illness that can lock you in a deep, dark world, where, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “It is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” But as someone who lives with depression, I understood. Depression is a monster; sometimes that monster is Shrek and sometimes it’s Godzilla. You pray for the Shrek days, but you prepare for the Godzilla days, deploying every weapon in your arsenal to keep Godzilla off your trail. And if that means, for Bruce, a scorching guitar solo, a larynx-ripping roar, a band that amplifies your pain, and if it takes four hours, night after night, city after city, then you do it.

With Springsteen on Broadway, Bruce mined his music for a deeper exploration into his process and evolution as an artist, not so much performing the songs we’ve all known for so long but reimagining them to suit the sensibilities of a then-sexegenarian who has seen and felt and lived.

It’s just him, on guitar and piano, with occasional accompaniment from his wife, Patti Scialfa, in a 960-seat Broadway theater. This was a next frontier for Springsteen, where he could center his prowess as a storyteller, scribe, and poet, and reimagine his oeuvre as an evening-length narrative.

Full disclosure: I watched Springsteen on Broadway 3,000 miles from Broadway, in the comfort of my living room in Los Angeles, on Netflix. Just as reading a book is a solo act and a deeply personal interchange between author and reader, watching Springsteen on Broadway let me engage in Bruce’s psychological/emotional/artistic journey. No need for dancing in the dark. Just processing on my own.

This manifestation of vulnerability, of personal excavation, inspired a new appreciation, a different connection—to an artist in service of and in full allegiance to his art, who is still searching, still seeking, but through different means, and who is willing to interrogate the mysteries and wonders of his long odyssey, and all that he created and shared along the way.

We all have chapters in our ongoing narratives that we would rather leave closed and unexamined. Perhaps we’d even want to excise them altogether. But Bruce, in this late-period exhumation, was more than willing to go there. While my teenage fandom was cause for escape, exultation, and empowerment, my late-middle-aged appreciation has inspired me to reexamine my own back pages for deeper truths about where I’ve been, and where I’m going.

The rock icon who once had me in his thrall is today a greater inspiration as a human, endowed with foibles and grace, darkness and light, demons and angels, in equal measure.

The post What Bruce Springsteen Taught Me Then—And Teaches Me Now appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The smartphone has become a modern Swiss Army knife: driver’s license, e-payment device, camera, radio, television, map, blood pressure monitor, workstation, babysitter, pocket AI, and general gateway to the internet. And now consumers are leaving their smartphones behind to sport lightweight smartwatches with equivalent functionality. With every update, our devices inch closer to us—our bodies, our minds. From the handheld, to the wearable, to the … What next?

Nearly 20 years ago, in 2006—before X, Amazon Web Services, iPhone, Fitbit, Uber, or ChatGPT—M.G. Michael was faced with a similar question. He was guest lecturing on the “Consequences of Innovation” at the University of Wollongong in Australia, focusing on emerging technologies in security. A student asked: “So then, where is all this surveillance heading?”

For a couple of years already, we had noticed hints of an ultimate destination in patents, pilots, and proposed products and services: chips implanted inside the human body to identify people and offer them digital services on demand. Hardware placed in the arm might let one pay at the checkout simply by waving a hand, or allow a first responder to scan a patient’s vital signs and medical records in an emergency. Such implants brought with them a perceived increase in security. They remained inside the body, hidden from view, and could not be stolen, or accidentally left behind.

M.G. searched for a word that would summarize what he was seeing emerge in these fields, and all around us. He imagined a coming together of Orwell’s Big Brother, microchip implants, radio frequency identification devices (RFID), Global Positioning Systems (GPS), apocalypticism, and Nietzsche’s idea of the ultimate, superior, progressed human form, the Übermensch. On the spot, he called it “uberveillance.” The neologism soon entered the lexicon.

Uberveillance is fundamentally an above and beyond, exaggerated, almost omnipresent 24/7 electronic surveillance. It is not only always on but also always with you. Like an airplane flight recorder, a personal “black box.” Or, if you prefer, it is like Big Brother on the inside looking out.

This kind of bodily and hyper-invasive monitoring is not risk-free, and won’t necessarily make us safer and more secure. Omnipresence in the physical world does not equate with omniscience. Despite their tremendous data gathering capacities, there is a real concern that implantable devices will breed misinformation, misinterpretation, and information manipulation, all of which may lead to misrepresentations of the truth.

In our original conception, uberveillance was multidimensional. A tiny RFID transponder, implanted in the arm, would connect with sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers. Uberveillance would use GPS and other technologies to allow designated authorities to understand the who, where, when, why, what, and how. We imagined government authorities would use it in the context of civilian, commercial, or national security—as a find-me alert. For example, monitoring people living with dementia or on extended supervision orders; tracking suspects in crimes, parolees, or notable public figures or dignitaries; and allowing access to secured buildings or rooms.

Yet despite the perceived benefits, even in the early 2000s, we couldn’t ignore the sinister undertones. How far would this go? Was uberveillant technology too alluring—difficult to resist because of its ease of use? What if it did not always work as it should, proving subject to tampering, data bias, and inference?

Constructing a verifiable digital end-to-end cyber-physical-social reality is impossible. There is no substitute for real life. Recorded data—incomplete, from multiple sources and without necessary quality checks—are not always accurate. Global positioning coordinates may lack precision when tall buildings obstruct a line-of-sight between the handheld or wearable technology and satellites. There are black spots in networks when an individual leaves an urban space, or moves between locations.

Furthermore, uberveillant systems leave out context. An image of an altercation may seem to provide evidence that implicates an individual, but snapshots of moments prior may show that they were acting in self-defense. Near real time is not real time. This is the great flaw in uberveillance.

Without capturing context, an accurate chronicle of activity is unattainable. And a flawed chronicle of activity can be devastating. GPS coordinates with a lag may tie a user to a suspicious event; facial recognition algorithms may identify a passerby as an individual of interest; implants that have been spoofed may appear in multiple hit lists, cloaking the identity of the bona fide individual at a given location; and biometric data could be interpreted to indicate distress when a subject may simply have been in reflection.

Your cell service provider or smartwatch manufacturer might assure you they’ll only use your data for research. But they may also inform you they have no control over how their partners might use the biometric and other data downstream. Your wearable data could end up in an AI model one day, or used by a prospective employer during a hiring process, or be presented as evidence in a court of law. The wrong data might render you unemployable, uninsurable, and ineligible for government benefits. In an instant you could become persona non grata.

Uberveillance advances the idea of “us” versus a series of “thems”—data brokers, Big Tech companies, government agencies, hackers, secret intelligence, first responders, caregivers, and others. In doing so, “they” have power over how others perceive us and use our data, potentially building multiple black boxes containing intricate profiles—limited accounts of what makes us “us.” This technology is not free, and will not set us free.

Today, as in 2006, this strikes us as technology’s natural trajectory. From the moment the first programmable general purpose digital computer, the ENIAC, was dubbed “an electronic brain,” it was always going to fuse with the body at its ultimate technological potential.

The paradox of all this pervasive vigilance is that the more security we hope for, the less we get.

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull,” Orwell ominously wrote in 1984. And yet uberveillance threatens that too: An embedded “smart” black box in the human body would encroach on a last fragment of private space. An internal closed-circuit television feed could bring about the most dehumanizing of prospects—a total loss of control and dignity, if used to surveil thoughts, rituals, habits, activities, appetites, urges, and movements. Such dystopian scenarios are no longer sci-fi imaginings alone.

This has ontological implications, directly to do with the nature of being. It could represent the consequential deconstruction of what it means to be human, to have agency, and to make choices for oneself. If uberveillance is to expand and forge ahead on its current path, the scenarios are countless and potential consequences staggering. At that point, we will have surrendered more than just our privacy.

The post Is ‘Uberveillance’ Coming for Us All? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But even as we wring our hands over all the ways AI might replace humans, we tend to forget or ignore what Torie Bosch, editor of the new book “You Are Not Expected to Understand This”: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World, called “the very human decision-making that goes into code.” Bosch, who is also editor of Future Tense (a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University), was moderating a Zócalo/Future Tense event that, like the book, was designed to help even those of us who know nothing about building software understand how the actual writing of code affects our lives and our world.

Bosch opened the discussion by asking a group of three tech scholars and makers to walk the audience, at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles and watching online, through the process: How does a string of instructions tapped into a keyboard by a programmer—software, a.k.a. code—become ubiquitous in our everyday lives?

“I wrote a piece of code in 1997 that was really designed to solve a problem,” began internet activist Ethan Zuckerman—who contributed an essay to the book, and whose 2013 book Rewire won the Zócalo Book Prize. At the time, he was working at an early web hosting service. “This was the dawn of user-created content, and advertisers were uncomfortable,” said Zuckerman. “Did they want to be associated with random people’s content?”

He wrote code essentially creating the pop-up ad—ensuring that a brand would not appear on the same page as possibly objectionable material. He solved the problem, but eventually realized that he had erred when he hadn’t looked at the assumptions behind it: the belief that the internet—like magazines and broadcast media—had to be supported by advertisements that needed to grab viewer attention and monetize it. “I’ve come to think of [that] as the original sin of the web,” said Zuckerman.

What if he had instead asked if advertising really was the best way to support the internet? What if he and his employer had “looked at the internet as a public service?” Zuckerman wondered. “How often are engineers solving problems but not doing the work of asking, ‘Is this the right problem to solve?’”

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

Media, culture, and communication scholar Charlton McIlwain, who also contributed an essay to the book, shared a similar story—though in this case “about the intentional consequences of technology.” He recounted the Police Beat Algorithm, a piece of code designed in the mid-1960s to help police figure out where to place patrols in a city. The software was “ostensibly about solving and preventing crime”—but actually solved for “a problem of Black people … a group of people starting to amass power and challenge a system.” (In other words, the software was destined to send more police into low-income, Black and brown communities—and to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.) That algorithm ultimately created today’s global surveillance infrastructure and everything “from facial recognition systems to racial profiling,” McIlwain said.

But code alone doesn’t create problems, noted Bosch—the fact is that coding “reflects and shapes human values.”

Zuckerman said that algorithms for setting bail and prison sentences based on data from the existing criminal justice system “are now locking into code racial biases that have been plaguing our nation for decades.”

This isn’t surprising for a society that puts technology before people, said McIlwain. “Human values, human interest, end up baked into these technological products that we make because that is fundamentally where we live,” he said.

Bosch asked if educational institutions should be stepping in with ethics instruction, and McIlwain and Zuckerman both agreed that computer scientists and engineers need to learn more about the complexity of society before they try to solve its problems.

The third panelist of the evening, augmented/virtual reality entrepreneur Nonny de la Peña, a longtime journalist and founding director of ASU’s Narrative and Emerging Media program, agreed. She argued for adding the arts and humanities to STEM education—turning it into “SHTEAM,” and having coders adopt an ethical code as stringent as the one traditionally used by journalists and newsrooms. “It goes beyond ‘do no harm,’” she said. At an institutional level, she added, every city and county should also build “a technology board, like a water board” to treat tech more like a public utility, that doesn’t discriminate against or redline certain groups.

All three panelists discussed the complexity of putting the onus on programmers themselves to blow the whistle on big tech. McIlwain pointed to the tension between making big money or making the world a better place. Zuckerman said that the tech world needs to help ensure that people who do blow the whistle, like AI researcher Timnit Gebru (who was fired by Google after advocating for diversity and writing a paper on bias in AI), have a safe place to land.

Nonetheless, all three panelists are optimistic about the next generation of programmers, who, McIlwain said, “are not fraught with everything that’s wrong about the world, and who have found folks who are allowing them the space to imagine, to be creative, to give us a blueprint for what could be our future.”

The final question of the audience Q&A session—which also included back-and-forth about accessibility in tech and the possibilities of AI writing code—also addressed young people, and whether they can be taught to resist advertising in order to neutralize algorithms.

De la Peña, the mother of a teenage boy—“who experienced a lot of stuff coming at him from Alex Jones and other things fed at him on YouTube”—said that such education must “be real touch, not tech touch.” In her case, a one-on-one discussion succeeded, but the question remains how schools can address these issues.

McIlwain and Zuckerman both noted that systemic and structural change that goes beyond algorithms and individual choice is more likely to be effective. “It’s not too late,” said Zuckerman.

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Perhaps it was the shift to fossil fuels and scientific medicine that led us to this place, a population of nearly 8 billion crowded onto a warming planet, a terrestrial species melting the ice caps so there is less and less land to inhabit or to grow food.

Or maybe it happened further back, with our jump down the food chain to become growers and eaters of grass (and maize, and rice, and sorghum). Agriculture started the slow demographic explosion of the last 10 millennia, pressing on biodiversity, and bringing on the sixth extinction. The anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott makes a strong case in his book Against the Grain that the shift to agriculture also ushered in slavery, oppressive states, and social inequality.

But it would be a mistake to see life before agriculture as the answer to our problems. Proponents of the “Paleo diet” promise personal wellbeing if we only return to pre-agricultural gastronomy. They usually stop short of suggesting we go big on protein by scavenging on the kills of big cats and hyenas, an important food source in some periods of prehistory.

So how does city life fit into all this? Is urban life another wrong turn? Should we return to the countryside—ideally, a bit of it with decent broadband and a farmers market within cycling distance? Not quite.

The spread of cities over the last 6,000 years is one of the epic themes of human history. It is well documented, since so many societies that built cities also developed writing systems. It is a global phenomenon—not because cities originated in one place and spread out over the planet, but because people invented cities, out of nothing, so many times. Ancient humans congregated and built in the valleys of Mexico, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus and north China, and also in the Sahel region south of the Sahara, in the Amazon Basin, in what are now the southeastern states of the U.S., in the Andes, in the forest of southeast Asia. People probably built cities in yet-unknown other places, too, where LiDAR and satellite imaging have not yet found them.

Cities followed agriculture in all these regions. At first, they varied widely from one place to another. There were low-density cities like those of the Maya, and tightly packed hill towns; instant cities built at the command of an Assyrian, Chinese, or Roman emperor, and others that grew slowly out of collective efforts like the settlements of the Etruscans. Modern cities, with their convergent architectures of steel and concrete, fiber optics and tarmac, are much more similar to each other than were the many seeds from which they have grown.

Today about a quarter of the people of the world live in cities of more than one million people: that share is growing faster than the global population. Growth has not been smooth, but it is now irreversible. The landscapes and biodiversity needed for gathering and hunting are long gone, and could never sustain today’s global population. We cannot turn our backs on farming or on cities. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a human future that is not more urban than ours, unless it’s a dystopian world founded on some species-wide catastrophe, like the one that destroyed the dinosaurs. Is such a colossal cull plausible? Even a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, global deaths add up to less than 0.4 percent of the world’s population. Could anything less than an asteroid strike or a super volcano explosion derail our urban journey now?

These doomsday scenarios aside, an increasingly urban future seems assured. But there is no need to be alarmed by it. One reason not to consign cities to the trash can of some of our species’ worst ideas is that we have turned out to be very well adapted to live in them. Human beings move easily in cities’ complex three-dimensional topography. We are adept at building social groups with strangers as well as kith and kin, we are tolerant of the new (and often nutritionally impoverished) diets that cities impose on their inhabitants, and we combine a sense of local territory (our homes, our neighborhoods) with a capacity for exploring and mapping new spaces that is far superior to that of our nearest animal relatives. We might have been born to live in cities.

We were not, of course, designed for city life. Evolution is the opposite of movement by design—it’s a lurching blindly into the future, through one happy accident after another (or at least, by following paths that are less disastrous than the alternatives). Our species has been around for some 300 million years, and we owe most of our city-friendly features to evolutionary processes that go back even further. For instance, our sociality, linked to the development of our frontal cortex, is pure primate. Our dietary flexibility probably developed in environments where it was never certain exactly which foods would be available. All this added up to an awesome potential for living in cities. We are not the only species with this potential. Mice, rats, bats, and house sparrows also do pretty well in concrete jungles. The difference is, we build cities. They have colonized them.

The evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson pointed out, in The Social Conquest of Earth, that other species too have taken advantage of the chance to live in dense communities. Some (but not all) bees and wasps, coral polyps and termites, and even naked mole rats have come to live what Wilson called eusocial lives, in which social cooperation becomes central. These species are not closely related—not to each other, and not to us—but they have one crucial thing in common. They all make something like a nest. Getting the most out of a social existence, argues Wilson, required cohabitation. Big brains need crowds.

Cities are our nests, so natural to the human animal that we find it difficult to imagine how we ever got on without them. How did we look after our big-brained but slow-developing children when we had no homes, nor enough neighbors or grandparents to care for the kids when we went foraging? How did our astonishing capacity to make tools and artifacts operate when we were so often on the move? If we wanted to develop technologies that were not all small, light, and easy to carry) we had to have a base. Camps and temporary homes must have done some service, and villages were good nests for a while, but only cities have made it possible for human societies to specialize, so everyone lived near a smith or a doctor or a priest, and we could make the most out of our talent for cooperation.

Cities are a new experiment, in evolutionary terms. Probably in the first thousand years or so there were many failures; archaeologists are beginning to map more clearly the urban civilizations that collapsed like so many houses of cards. But we got better at it. Most ancient cities were small just because it was so difficult to provision large ones in time of crisis. The first city builders often concentrated their energy on the house of gods and kings, and on defensive walls. Later generations turned their attention to water supply and drainage, and to constructing roads and canals, granaries and reservoirs. Fire and earthquakes ravaged many ancient cities until architects learned to build in stone and brick, to plan cities for safety, to build resilient structures.

Some of those cities turned out to be so resilient they are still with us today. Athens is maybe 3,500 years old; Rome and Istanbul, nearly 3,000 years old. Even medieval capitals such as Cairo and Tunis are close by ancient predecessors in Memphis and Carthage. Once we found good places to nest, we often stayed.

Modern cities are far more elaborate of course. Few ancient cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants. Today there are more than 30 cities of more than 10 million. We have learned to pack our nests more densely, piling our homes high. Even more important have been improvements in our cities’ nervous and circulatory systems (electricity, gas, the internet)—the channels by which food and water enter the nest, and waste is removed from it. The modern megacity depends on fast transportation that allows citizens to live far from where they work. These technologies are different from those employed in Tenochtitlan, Alexandria and Baghdad, but the principles are the same.

For the last few thousand years, our societies have mostly been ruled from cities, and our key infrastructures have been designed for urban populations—a state of affairs that holds great promise for humanity and the natural world. Done properly, city life is the most environmentally friendly way to live. Waste disposal, sanitation and recycling is easier to organize in cities than in the countryside. Our generation will see the end of private cars powered by fossil fuels. Already many city dwellers use public transport for most of their travel needs. Electric cars and buses are city friendly as well as environmentally friendly.

Romantics have been calling for us to go back to nature ever since the Industrial Revolution began. But the sums don’t add up. There is not enough “nature” out there to support us all. The kinds of lives we want now—high tech, highly connected, materially rich—work better in cities. And it is better for the planet that we don’t try and live this way in what wilderness is left.

We have not arrived at the city of the future yet, but it’s early days. Each generation our nests get better and better. Cities will continue to be better connected, greener and healthier, and that is all good news. So, city life: not one of our worst ideas, then, after all.

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Q: As an historian, what do you think about the dueling arguments that, on the one hand, there is an empathy deficit going on, and on the other, social media is constantly bombarding us with things to be empathetic with?

A: I would say that the duel is not just about empathy deficits. There are also dueling positions about whether empathy is a bad basis for human rights or international politics, generally, because it acts as if [these things are] an affective question when [they’re] really a political question. But there is considerable interest in the question of empathy. So, on the one hand people say that it’s not a good thing to be thinking about, and on the other hand lots more people are thinking about it.

Part of it is a general shift in the humanities and social sciences, especially in the humanities, toward being more interested in the affective, emotional side of everything. There was a turn within neuroscience to be more interested in how emotions are crucial to reasoning and that kind of set [off] a lot of different kinds of arguments: philosophical, literary, you name it.

Q: One of the things that really struck me in reading your book—about how epistolary novels connected to human rights and revulsion around torture—was this real, incredible, excitement that people had reading these novels like Clarissa, Pamela, and Julie. The heroines of these novels, the people that men and women were empathizing with, were women. I wondered if empathy is still seen as female, and does that give it its weird moral authority? Because it definitely continues to have a very strong moral authority.

A: I think, for me what was really interesting about the 18th century was precisely that it was actually not assumed that it was just women who were going to empathize with these female characters. I think it was assumed that men were going to empathize with these female characters, and they did empathize with these female characters.

But a female character was the best representation of these agonies over personal autonomy. Women felt constrained, so they could be the subject of tragedy in a way that men couldn’t, because men were assumed to be autonomous and could just leave. We have many more novels about men leaving [for] picaresque adventures in search of autonomy.

This is inconceivable for women. So women become ideal for the representation of conflicts over autonomy. They can’t leave. They have to fight it out—either in their current situation or in a very constrained orbit. In Clarissa there is actually quite a bit of movement but it’s within England, if not within London. Whereas men can join the army, they can go overseas, they can join the navy.

Finds Pamela Writing. Painting by Joseph Highmore. Image courtesy of Tate.

Q: There is a sense among some people that human rights are naturally expanding, because if they’re based in empathy or a feeling of distress the line will naturally continue to move. How do you see the future of human rights based in empathy?

A: It’s an interesting question, when it’s not an incredibly tragic one. This is exactly what everyone is dealing with on immigration. Some part of the population is urging that we empathize with people fleeing who want to come to our country, that we see their common humanity. And some part of the population is saying this has gone too far, there need to be borders, we can only protect the community by keeping other people from getting into it. So, the issue of who you are supposed to have feelings for, and what the consequences of those feelings should be, is right now very much front and center. It would be a mistake to say it’s an easy question.

The chances for mobility are now so great in the world, even if they’re dangerous and horrible chances for mobility, that it’s a real issue. Is it really imaginable that a nation would say, “We’ll take anyone who wants to come”? Probably not. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s realistic to say, “Let’s have closed borders.” Which is why it’s such a complicated question.

Q: People are moving more. There’s also the growth of faster and faster communication. I wonder if you see the potential for even great empathetic leaps as the communication changes, along with other sorts of artistic experiences creating empathy.

A: I don’t think this works in lockstep: You get a new media technology and you get a new boundary of empathy. I don’t think it works quite that way. It’s so hard to predict how this line is going to move. Gay rights is obviously a stunning example of this. I saw a program on TV recently about AIDS back in the 1970s and 1980s. I lived through that, these were my friends, and I can’t even believe it … The kinds of things that people said about gay people in the 1980s—I almost can’t even believe it because we live in such a different world now. That’s the kind of thing I’m interested in.

At some point slavery became so intolerable to some portion of the population, not everybody, but to some portion. And it goes really quickly from being tolerable to being absolutely intolerable. That’s what I’m interested in. Slavery for centuries and no one did anything about it to speak of, and then at the end of the 18th century all of a sudden there is this revulsion.

Obviously it’s an emotional feeling—but it’s not like people automatically start to feel it when X happens. Gay Rights, for example. You go from some huge portion of the population being disgusted by the idea to some rather large portion of the population saying “Well, okay.” I mean it’s the same people. We’re not talking about some new generation. How that interior feeling of right and wrong gets activated—that’s the thing that interests me. Now we’re seeing that with trans people.

Pamela in the Bedroom with Mrs. Jewkes and Mr. B. Painting by Joseph Highmore. Image courtesy of Tate.

Q: Beyond trans rights, do you see another frontier that’s coming up?

A: Animals. I’m a meat eater but I say to all my friends: X number of years from now, I don’t know how many it’s going to be, we’re going to stop eating meat. I just think it’s going to happen. Again, it’ll probably happen for some people rather suddenly. People just can’t do it anymore.

Q: Obviously terrible backlashes have been part of the process of the establishment of human rights. Going forward do you think empathy is up to the task for what we have to do or are we asking too much of empathy?

A: I think it actually has to be up to the task. It has proved to be a very powerful force and it is much more powerful than rationally arguing cases. (Though the courts in this country have an absolutely fundamental role in all of this, don’t get me wrong.) The backlash part isn’t really so much that people don’t believe in human rights. It’s more a question of who they apply to.

Very few people have argued that they don’t think people have rights. It’s that they think they have to be limited: They have to be limited to the citizens of your country; they have to be limited to straight people; they have to be limited to whatever. It’s more the question of where the boundaries are.

The reason that’s the case is because it’s not obvious what the alternative would be. If you want to say that human rights are nonsense, which is a position that people have taken, you can make a strong philosophical argument. The issue that you have to resolve then is: “What is it that you think is the appropriate replacement?” And the only thing that people have been able to come up with is the rights of citizens within a nation or the rights of the nation as a superior community. But that led to such problematic things in the 1930s that I think that people aren’t super into that argument anymore. The backlash opinion now is that rights should be limited to the citizens of the nation as it is currently constituted. Of course, in the United States there are staggering numbers of people from other places. Who are, however, all too willing to shut the door now that they’re here.

The post How Our Evolving Understanding of Individual Autonomy Led to Human Rights for All appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I used to take audiences on a 125,000-year tour of these two venerable institutions. I’d tell them about bonobos, chimps, and baboons giving sanctuary to members of enemy primate communities; about the ancient custom of seeking sanctuary by touching the garment or body of a powerful priest or ruler; about 1,000 years of church sanctuary in England and other countries; about the Underground Railroad, Holocaust rescuers, and the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s.

But recently, at a high school in suburban Maryland, the students’ first question was, “What can we do to help refugees and asylum seekers right now?” They also wanted to know how I, as an activist, keep going in the face of politicians’ racist and xenophobic attacks on people fleeing persecution, torture and murder.

“First of all,” I said, “I’m a very stubborn person, prone to indignation about injustice.” I explained that I try to undertake modest efforts to help migrants in my local community, so I can see short-term, positive results. And I said that those who defend and protect refugees and asylum seekers are part of something much bigger than themselves, something that’s been going on for thousands of years.

Giving refuge to the stranger is in our DNA. We’re a highly social species, as likely to welcome outsiders as to drive them away. Hospitality, protection, welcome, and refuge are ingrained in our customs and behavior. In many societies studied by anthropologists and historians, hospitality may be extended to members of hostile communities. Offering refuge to strangers diversifies the gene pool, encourages innovation, and enriches cultural practices. It institutionalizes empathy, mercy, sociability, and openness.

Shelter for those accused of wrongdoing or fleeing from persecution or slavery has existed in every major religious tradition and in numerous societies since time immemorial. Its recorded history goes back at least 5,000 years. Sanctuaries have included altars, churches, temples, cities, and sacred groves. Asylum comes from the Greek word asylos, “inviolable,” which referred to sacred spaces in ancient Greece to which slaves could flee from cruel masters.

Even the ancient Romans, who were not renowned for their compassion, built temples where slaves and miscreants could flee. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church borrowed sanctuary from other traditions. Church sanctuary lasted for more than a thousand years in Europe, until governments abolished it in the 17th century, because it interfered with their control of the legal system. The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 and laid the foundations of modern international law, proclaimed provision of asylum as a sovereign right of nation states. Thus asylum, a secular institution under state control, replaced religious sanctuary in the law.

Over the past 500 years, government asylum and religious sanctuary have sometimes run along parallel lines, sometimes conflicted and sometimes diverged. During the 20th century, governments started passing laws to restrict access to asylum, especially before, during, and after wars, when massive numbers of desperate, persecuted people sought refuge.

In response to the flight of refugees from Germany and other European countries in the 1930s, the principle of nonrefoulement came into international law. It stipulates that no asylum seeker may be returned to a country where he or she will be persecuted, tortured, or killed. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, proclaims, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” But despite signing many international agreements and passing national laws that mandate these principles, governments have often violated them for political and economic reasons.

So sanctuary usually operates outside or against the law. The Underground Railroad was an illegal, secret movement, some of whose leaders were prosecuted, fined, or imprisoned. Holocaust rescuers risked death, and some were killed, for hiding thousands of Jews. The U.S. government prosecuted leaders of the 1980s Sanctuary Movement for harboring or smuggling migrants.

Yet sanctuary thrives as a powerful expression of resistance to unjust laws. It is often a deliberate act of civil disobedience. Giving sanctuary may mean accepting the risk of prosecution to obey what its practitioners consider a higher law. Sanctuary has life-saving meaning to those who seek it and is a moral imperative for those who provide it. That is where its power lies.

At the peak of the 1980s Sanctuary Movement, some 400 churches and dozens of cities gave shelter to thousands of Central Americans denied asylum in the United States. The churches’ and cities’ efforts, along with widespread opposition to U.S. backing of murderous regimes in Central America, helped change U.S. foreign and immigration policies. After 1988, the U.S. government lessened support for repressive governments in that region and allowed more Central Americans to stay in the United States.

The New Sanctuary Movement started about 10 years ago, to aid Mexican and other migrants living in the shadows. Over the past two years, dozens of churches around the country have given sanctuary to undocumented people, for months at a time. The migrants waited in the safety of churches and synagogues while their lawyers negotiated with the government for suspension of deportation orders. Then the migrants returned to their U.S. families to await the outcome of their cases. These are a few among many examples of successful sanctuary, in highly publicized instances where local communities know and support migrants and their families.

For decades U.S. enforcement agents have refrained from raiding schools, hospitals, and houses of worship. The government seems to have recognized that invading traditional safe havens would arouse public outcry. However, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, could cancel this “sensitive-locations policy” at any moment, leaving sanctuary-giving institutions vulnerable to government intrusion.

Even during the Obama administration, agents raided private homes without warrants, sometimes under false pretenses. They arrested undocumented high school students on their way to school, parishioners in church parking lots, and patients outside hospitals. More than 2 million undocumented people were deported from the U.S. between 2009 and 2016. ICE increased the number of detained migrants in 2016 from 34,000 to more than 40,000 per day, in hundreds of facilities. Like the Reagan administration during the 1980s, the Obama administration refused to recognize most Central American asylum claims. The government detained thousands of migrant mothers and children, even after federal courts ordered their release.

The Trump administration already has shown that it will show no more mercy toward undocumented people or would-be asylum seekers slated for detention and deportation. In response, increasing numbers of people are likely to offer sanctuary in houses of worship, educational institutions, and their own homes. As millions of desperate people flee persecution, war, and environmental disaster, and governments refuse to shelter them, asylum is under threat all over the world. But history teaches that sanctuary is an integral part of human nature. It will last as long as people of good will are ready to risk welcoming the stranger.

The post Sanctuary Is an Integral Part of Human Nature appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 1798, poet William Wordsworth and his sister took a walk in the Welsh countryside. The poem he wrote about that walk—“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”—moved readers deeply. Wordsworth was one of the leading poets of the Romantic era, and he called poetry “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

What is it about humans and our relationship to language that allows us to be so moved by poetry? In this interview philosopher Charles Taylor talks about his next book, which contemplates the change in Romantic poetry, and what it is that poetry proves about being human.

Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf is one scientist studying the big puzzle of how the brain reads. She explains in this essay how Taylor’s arguments about language as a fundamentally human endeavor add to that debate.

The post VIDEO<span class="colon">:</span> What Does Poetry Prove About Humans? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As we gain greater power over these units of heredity, we have to ask deep questions about how far we are willing to go. Earlier this month The New York Times reported that scientists are privately discussing manufacturing the entire DNA contained in human chromosomes out of chemicals. The activity raises the specter of being able to create a human being without parents through cloning, but according to the Times report, an organizer of the proposed project was quick to circumscribe its ambitions, saying it was aimed at creating cells, not people. Their goal, he said, was to improve scientists’ ability to synthesize DNA, techniques that could apply to animals, plants, and microbes.

With so much promise and peril in the air, how should we navigate this new scientific frontier? In advance of an upcoming Zócalo Public Square event with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and physician Siddhartha Mukherjee asking “Will genetic engineering endanger humanity?”, we posed to experts a related question: “What is the greatest possible benefit—and the biggest danger—of gene manipulation?”

The post Will Modern Genetics Turn Us Into Gene “Genies”? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.