I wade today into the fraught topic of systemic racism and discrimination. I do so because I believe systemic racism exists and that it can be fought. It is my contention in this article that when a minority faces systemic disadvantages, which are the flip side of the dominant group’s entrenched privileges, good will and warm feelings alone are not sufficient to disrupt the status quo.
Like all of you, I’ve been coming across more and more articles about how the world is about to change as a result of the pandemic. With titles like “Ten Ways Your Life Will Never Be the Same” or “Twenty Changes Coming to the Workplace”, such articles purport to enlighten us about the post-pandemic world that lies just beyond our doorstep.
Social distancing measures have been in full effect for weeks and legions of people have retreated – more or less happily – to the relative safety of their homes. Workplaces and public spaces that used to teem with people lie eerily empty and many employees – fortunate ones for whom telecommuting proved possible – have carried on with their professional lives in a strange virtual world where newly disembodied organizations large and small continue to operate.
What we are attempting, as far as I know, has never been done. Some microorganisms such as yeasts, fungi and bacteria can go completely dormant for periods of time that can stretch over thousands of years, a phenomenon known as super-long anabiosis: a glacier moves in, the bacteria go into a deep freeze; the glacier pulls back ten thousand years later, the bacteria go back to their business.
I had lunch, a little while ago, with a friend who had recently vacationed in Japan for a few weeks. As we were waiting for our food to arrive, the sushi chef working close by behind his counter, my friend told me the story of a successful Japanese restaurant owner who had been asked if he had any plans to expand his restaurant—to get a larger space and add more tables.
I asserted a few weeks ago, in my last article, that privacy is everybody’s concern. Everyone seems to agree: Try finding an organization these days – any kind of organization – that doesn’t have a privacy policy.
The kind of social control that monitoring and surveillance make possible can take many forms and benign motivations will always be invoked (indeed, reasons given will always sound very compelling in the moment), but when it comes to the very foundations of individual and collective freedom, the bar should be set very high indeed.
Society as we know it is a vast tapestry of overlapping organizations – some private, some public – that serve to structure human activities and human relationships into an edifice of intricate complexity.
The essay that follows is adapted from the transcript of a keynote address I delivered on September 26, 2019. We have gone, as a species, through a number of transformative technological revolutions.
Doing the right thing is not as easy as just saying it. It can often require real courage to do what is right, and humans are notoriously fallible in this front. But another, equally daunting obstacle stands in the way of what is good and just – one that we have likely been struggling with for as long as our species has had a notion of right and wrong: How exactly, pray tell, does one determine what is the right thing to do in a given situation?
