September 13, 2019 was the 15th anniversary of the first day of school at Island Pacific academy. Head of School Gerald Teramae led his staff, faculty, students, trustees and parents in celebrating, convening everyone on the lawn in front of the Elementary Building to honor Larry Caster, Judy, and me as the co-founders. We felt honored.
I was asked to say a few words and, as one might expect, I spoke about the values upon which we had started IPA: the power of human kindness and generosity of spirit. I noted that we sensed that these and other values were living parts of the school’s daily practice, and that made us ha’aheo (humbly proud).
Two recent readings brought the event to mind. Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, a superb history of our species and one of the most thought-provoking books Judy and I have read together, wrote that 600 years elapsed between the discovery of gunpowder and its first use in cannon to turn the tide of battle. Only 45 years went by between the emergence of the theory behind splitting the atom and the use of atomic bombs on two cities in Japan. In other words, the rate at which our species is uncovering new knowledge and applying it to specific uses has increased exponentially.
One question left in the reader’s mind: how speedily will we uncover more potent ways to kill each other?
There is debate about how rapidly the body of knowledge possessed by humankind doubles. The estimates are usually expressed in terms of months or years, not decades or generations. I pointed out to some IPA students in my remarks at the IPA anniversary that the first iPhone was sold was five years into the future on the first day of school at IPA. And tweets were the domain of birds.
Of related interest was what Mark Sappenfield, editor of The Christian Science Monitor, said in a story about the work of a group of scientists who were interested in “how human beings think about one another.” They devised a simple experiment involving kindergarten children.
They divided the children at random and gave them different colored shirts. So, some had red shirts, some blue, some orange. Without prompting, the children found others with the same color shirt and formed a group. As Sappenfield wrote: “And that was just the beginning. Kids shared more of their play money with their color group. They had more positive thoughts about fellows in their color group and felt they could trust them more. ‘All of this arose simply because of randomly assigned T-shirt colors,’ notes sociologist Nicholas Christakis in his new book Blueprint.’”
For centuries, human beings have lived in groups and communities characterized by their similar appearances. Indeed, when someone of a different skin color appeared in a place where only people of one skin color lived, he or she was regarded as an oddity and seldom integrated into the host culture. The kindergarteners were just doing what their ancestors had tended to do—separate on the basis of visual information.
Once the Age of Exploration happened, different colored people met each other more frequently. Still, there were few instances of wholesale integration of multiple skin colors into a common society. Better, faster modes of transportation accelerated mixing. But the history of the world since has been marred by instances of societies in which the differences of skin color presented major challenges difficult to overcome.
Why? The kindergarten story suggests hardwiring. Harari’s observation raises the apparent fact that the rapid development of technology outpaces the capacity of human cognition to keep up.
If we are hardwired in a way that is counter to what we hope might be possible in terms of living together with people who look different from us, if we are overwhelmed by the rapid changing of the world in which we must live, what might we do to mitigate the disconnects?
People of a Certain Age, what draws you to a leader you trust? I think that a leader’s values play a significant part, to the extent that you can discern what those values are. Character matters.
Policy positions, if leaders are worth their salt, are responsive to context, existing conditions that are, of course, changeable. The rapid acceleration of the body of knowledge ensures that.
Values endure, or they ought to. And if a leader espouses a clear set of values and them tries to live by them, that matters. Many homo sapiens are part of some specific religious tradition, and they, in theory, are connected to a specific set of values. But, asking whether or not a person lives a life consistent with those values is still a fair question.
And how do those traditions come to grips with the rapid changes in the world in which they operate? It does no good to pine for halcyon days of the past that weren’t so halcyon anyway. They’re just passed.
Does one value the dignity of every human being? Does one see people of all colors aspiring to lives of peace and prosperity? Does one see the need for “something like a star, to be staid on,” to quote Robert Frost, in the midst of a meteoric pace of change? Does one see the power of human kindness and demonstrate a generosity of spirit?
IPA is proud to be a place “where values matter.” So should politics.
Daniel E. White
January 20, 2020