“In the old days a parent would catch their kid doing something bad, and what would they do? They would say, ‘Go to your room,’” remarked Seidman. “As long as they knew where their kids were physically in the house, they could control them—so they sent them up to their room, where there was no TV.” Now you send your kid to their room, he added, and they are still connected to the whole world with secret apps that Mom and Dad cannot penetrate—where it looks like they are calculating but are actually sexting.
You gave your kids a cell phone so you could better track them down after midnight or have them brought home from a party by Uber. But that Apple iPhone, rather than being just an extended leash, turns out to also be the key to a world of forbidden apples. So, “Go to your room” now has to be “Hand over your smartphone, your tablet, your iPod, your Apple Watch, your wireless card, and the code to your vault apps—and then go to your room.”
Unfortunately, these ungoverned realms aren’t just the tool du jour of edgy teenagers. CNN.com reported on December 17, 2015, in the wake of the Paris jihadist suicide attacks that “investigators of the Paris attacks have found evidence they believe shows some of the terrorists used encrypted apps to hide plotting for the attacks … Among the apps officials found used by the terrorists were WhatsApp and Telegram, both of which boast of end-to-end encryption that protects the privacy of their users and are difficult to decrypt.”
And then there was the celebrated case in April 2016, when the FBI demanded that Apple give it the keys to a cyberlocker in the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, the gunman in the December 2, 2015, shooting in San Bernardino, California, that killed fourteen people. Apple refused to help the FBI, citing privacy concerns for the iPhone’s users all over the world. The FBI eventually managed to break into the phone and extract the data by purchasing “a tool” from a third-party cybersecurity outfit that the FBI director, James Comey, would not identify. This arms race between the principles of privacy and the necessities of security has only just begun. It demands a serious rethinking by the U.S. Congress of how privacy in cyberspace should be governed and balanced against the rising impact of super-empowered angry men and women.
Time for Everyone to Go Back to Sunday School
To be sure, there will always be evil in the world, there will always be criminality, there will always be swindlers who use the fruits of technological progress or the freedom of cyberspace to cheat the community or their neighbor or a stranger. To talk about how to better govern such realms is always, at best, to talk about increasing the odds of restraining more bad behaviors than not—because they will never be eliminated.
The first line of defense for any society is always going to be its guardrails—laws, stoplights, police, courts, surveillance, the FBI, and basic rules of decency for communities like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. All of those are necessary, but they are not sufficient for the age of accelerations. Clearly, what is also needed—and is in the power of every parent, school principal, college president, and spiritual leader—is to think more seriously and urgently about how we can inspire more of what Dov Seidman calls “sustainable values”: honesty, humility, integrity, and mutual respect. These values generate trust, social bonds, and, above all, hope. This is opposed to what Seidman calls “situational values”—“just doing whatever the situation allows”—whether in the terrestrial realm or cyberspace. Sustainable values do “double duty,” adds Seidman, whose company, LRN, advises global companies on how to improve their ethical performance. They animate behaviors that produce trust and healthy interdependencies and “they inspire hope and resilience—they keep us leaning in, in the face of people behaving badly.”
When I think of this challenge on a global scale, my own short prescription is that we need to find a way to get more people to practice the Golden Rule. And it doesn’t matter which version you were taught. It can be “Do unto others as you would wish they would do unto you,” or its variant from the Babylonian Talmud, where the great Jewish teacher Rabbi Hillel famously said, “That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow. This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.” Or any other variant enshrined by your faith.
When one of us can kill all of us, when all of us can fix everything, and when more others can do unto you from farther away and you can do unto more others from farther away, the Golden Rule has never been more important and more in need of scaling.
What is so special about the Golden Rule is that while it is the simplest of all moral guides, “it produces the most complex of all behaviors—it’s ever adaptive, it applies to every imaginable situation in a way that no rulebook ever could,” argues Gautam Mukunda, a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School. When the world is already complex, you don’t want to make it more complicated. Make it simple. And no moral edict packs more punch simply than the Golden Rule—everything else really is commentary.
I know—to even talk about scaling the Golden Rule to more people in more situations sounds utterly unrealistic. But the simple truth is: If we can’t get more people doing unto others as they would want others to do unto them, if we can’t inspire more sustainable values, we will be “the first self-endangered species,” argues Amory Lovins.
Is that realistic enough for you?
Changing what people believe is hard. Universal acceptance is not in the cards. Even broaching the notion sounds naïve today. But I will tell you what is really naïve: ignoring this challenge—this need for moral innovation—in this age of super-empowered angry men and women. Thinking that’s going to end well is the essence of naïveté, not to mention recklessness. For my money, naïveté is the new realism.
Nearing the end of his second term in office, President Obama gave voice to exactly this sentiment in the speech he delivered as the first American president to visit Hiroshima, on May 27, 2016: “Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines,” said Obama. “The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.”
Our calling today, Obama added, is “to see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition. To define our nations not by our capacity to destroy but by what we build. And perhaps, above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.”
I don’t have the words to say it better—and it is not naïve. It’s the essence of cold, hard realism today. I repeat: naïveté is the new realism—naïve is thinking that we are going to survive as a species in the age of accelerations without learning to govern our new realms in new ways and our old realms in new ways. And, yes, that is going to require some very rapid moral and social evolution.
Where to even begin?
The Martian
One practical way to begin is to anchor as many people as possible in healthy communities. Beyond laws and guardrails, police and courts, there is no better source of restraint than a strong community. Africans didn’t coin the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” for nothing. Communities also do double duty. They create a sense of belonging that generates the trust that has to underlie the Golden Rule, and also the invisible restraints on those who would still think of crossing redlines.
I was in Israel on September 11, 2001, and interviewed Israeli intelligence experts the next morning about what they had learned about suicide bombers, having confronted so many in their fight with the Palestinians. I never forgot what they said. They said that while Israel, with its deeply embedded intelligence networks, could stop some of these bombers before they headed out of their home villages in the West Bank or Gaza and blew themselves up in a bus or restaurant, a few would always get through�
�unless the Palestinian village said “no,” unless the village said that this is not martyrdom that we approve of but murder that we don’t approve of.
In a healthy community people are not only looking out for each other; they are getting out of Facebook and into each other’s faces. Healthy communities shame and mobilize against destructive and abusive behaviors. When family, community, and cultural and religious restraints are removed, or never present, suicide bombers can much more easily flourish.
Here is another story about the truck-driver terrorist in Nice who killed eighty-five people. It’s from AFP:
Neighbors of the man suspected to have killed scores of people in a truck attack on the Nice seafront described him Friday as a loner with no visible religious affiliation, as forensic experts searched his flat. AFP reporters interviewed about a dozen neighbours of the man, named by police as 31-year-old Franco-Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, whose identity papers were found in the truck. They portrayed him as a solitary figure who rarely spoke and did not even return greetings when their paths crossed in the four-storey block, located in a working-class neighborhood of Nice.
Hal Harvey, the environmental strategist, once remarked that “what keeps me up at night is the thought of some guy in a dark room eating pizza out of a delivery box, staring into a computer figuring out how to open the gates of the Hoover Dam—stuff you would only think of if you are morally and socially disconnected. It is much easier to break a dam than build one.” In a world of super-empowered individuals we need to redouble our efforts to ensure that in as many ways as possible we are creating moral contexts and weaving healthy interdependencies that embrace the immigrant, the stranger, and the loner, and inspire more people in more places to want to make things rather than break things.
There is no restraint stronger than thinking your friends and family will hate or disrespect you for what you do—and that can be generated only by a community. “All over the country there are schools and organizations trying to come up with new ways to cultivate character,” my colleague David Brooks noted in his November 27, 2015, column in The New York Times. “The ones I’ve seen that do it best, so far, are those that cultivate intense, thick community. Most of the time character is not an individual accomplishment. It emerges through joined hearts and souls, and in groups.”
One way to reinforce and scale the character-building norms of healthy communities is by showing people the joys and the fruits that can come from joining hearts, souls, and hands—what happens when we don’t just not do unto others but actually do with others in ways that are big and hard and make a difference.
For instance, I really loved the movie The Martian—but not only for the wonderful acting and the plot about a U.S. astronaut, played by Matt Damon, who gets marooned on Mars. My favorite scene was when NASA has to quickly assemble a rocket to ferry critical supplies to its stranded astronaut, but the rocket explodes shortly after takeoff because the time frame did not allow for proper inspections and preflight testing. As NASA scrambles for another solution (it takes a long time to build a rocket), the movie suddenly cuts—as China Daily noted in its September 12, 2015, review—to “the inner sanctum of the China National Space Agency. Two ranking officials … discuss what China could possibly do to help the hopeless situation, and how it might play out for China politically, diplomatically and financially if they did. They just so happen to have a rocket all ready to go, but because China’s program is so secretive, no one else in the world knows about it, so if they don’t offer to help, no one would be the wiser.”
But the Chinese, in an unprompted act of international collaboration, decide to help save the U.S. astronaut on Mars from starving to death and offer their delivery rocket to get “the Martian” his desperately needed care package. We see the Chinese and American space experts collaborating to solve the problem, and at the end of the movie we see CNSA’s leadership side by side with NASA’s, rooting together—along with people all over the globe—for what becomes a successful rescue mission.
Alas, it could only happen in Hollywood. It was political science fiction because, as China Daily also noted, “since 2011, NASA has been banned by Congress from collaborating with China, because of human rights issues and national security concerns. The ban was slipped into the 2011 budget by then congressman Frank Wolf, a long-serving Republican from Virginia, who chaired the subcommittee overseeing NASA. ‘We don’t want to give [China] the opportunity to take advantage of our technology and we have nothing to gain from dealing with them,’ he told Science Insider then.”
But the author of the book and the producers of the film The Martian were on to something. That make-believe scene of international cooperation touched me, and I was not alone in feeling that. It was reported that in many theaters, audiences applauded at the ending, with its Hollywood depiction of international cooperation. The beauty of the film, though, was in how the director made it all look so normal, so logical, so right—leaving you to think: “Why don’t we always behave that way? How much better off would we all be?”
The fact is, for our survival as a species, our very notion of “community” has to expand to the boundaries of the planet. That is a big statement, but it is true: if Mother Nature is treating us all as one, and if the power of one, the power of machines, and the power of flows can touch all of us at once, then we are a community whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not. And if we are a global community, we have to start to act like one.
“Interdependency is a moral reality,” explains Seidman. “It is a reality in which we rise and fall together; we affect each other profoundly from great distances in ways we never could before. In such a world, there is only one strategy to survive and thrive: it is to forge healthy, deep, and enduring interdependencies—in our relationships, in our communities, between businesses, between countries—so that we rise, and not fall, together. It’s not complicated, but it’s hard.” Our motto in today’s world, adds Tom Burke, the British environmentalist, should be: “It takes a planet to raise a child.”
Why is that so hard? Because “the one big bug we have as humans is that we are tribal,” answers Marina Gorbis, executive director at the Institute for the Future. “We always need the group to give us identity. We are wired that way. From the first campfire, human beings evolved as tribal beings.”
And therein lies the challenge, and the need for moral innovation: in a much more interdependent world we have to redefine the tribe we are in—we have to enlarge the notion of community—precisely as President Obama advocated in his Hiroshima speech: “What makes our species unique [is that] we’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We can tell our children a different story, one that describes a common humanity, one that makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted. The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace.”
Gorbis is right that we are wired to be tribal, but we are not hardwired to view our tribe in the narrowest way possible. Unlike animals, we can adapt, and we can learn that in order to survive we have to widen the circle of the campfire. The opera star Carla Dirlikov Canales, thirty-six, is the product of a Mexican mother and a Bulgarian father and an upbringing in the state of Michigan. She has sung Carmen more than eighty times all around the world. We first met at an arts festival at the Kennedy Center, and she articulated this challenge in a compelling way that I had never heard before. She said that growing up in America as a non-WASP, she spent her life “checking the box labeled ‘other.’ It made me feel like I didn’t belong in any box. It made me feel like an alien. And I didn’t like that feeling. Because I think, as humans, we yearn to belong, and as I started to think about it on a broader level, I began to think that I am human, so I do belong. I belong to the ‘all’ box. We all belong to the ‘all’ box … and we all need to go from ‘the other’ to ‘the all.’” At a time when America is becoming a “minority-majority”
country, Canales has started her own little organization to widen the campfire—“to help others make the journey from the other to the all.”
On May 3, 2016, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition carried a story by its social science reporter Shankar Vedantam, who specializes in the unseen patterns in human behavior, about new research on the health benefits of dancing with others. “Psychology researchers at the University of Oxford,” Vedantam explained, had “recently published a study in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. They brought volunteers into a lab and taught them different dance moves. They placed the volunteers in groups of four on the dance floor and put headphones on them so they could hear music. Some of them were taught the same dance moves, and others were taught different dance moves. Before and after the volunteers danced to music, the researchers measured their pain threshold by squeezing their arms … with a blood pressure cuff.”
What did they find? Said Vedantam:
There were huge differences in pain perception before and after the volunteers danced together …
When the volunteers were taught the same dance moves and heard the same songs as the others, their movements synchronized on the dance floor … Afterwards, these volunteers were able to withstand significantly more pain—their threshold for pain increased.
By contrast, the volunteers who heard different songs, or were taught different dance moves to the same music, and didn’t synchronize their movements, these volunteers experienced either no change in their pain perception or an increase in their pain perception, they actually felt more pain than they did before.
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