Issue No.

$5.00

PURPOSE & MEANING

RIGHT & WRONG
with Maria Popova
HOW LITERACY HAS
EVOLVED CHILDHOOD
with Hayley Eichenbaum
THE UNCERTAIN
BIOLOGICAL BASIS
OF MORALITY
with Robert Wright

Issue No.1

CONTENTS
Uncommon Findings:

The Extinction of Childhood

Barriers to Creativity in Education

Over the last century it can be seen that the behavior, language, attitudes, and desireseven
the physical appearanceof adults and children are becoming increasingly indistinguishable.

A new study by Adobe highlights the importance of preparing students to be innovators

and how testing and government mandates are stifling creativity in the classroom.

by HAYLEY EICHENM AN

by TACY TOBRIDGE

Uncommon Interview:

An Interview with Maria Popova

Shuli Hallak: Invisible Networks

Maria Popova is the founder and editor of Brain Pickings, has written for a number
of high profile magazines. Read about her work, life and brain pickings here.

Invisible Networks is the ongoing project of Shuli Hallak, whose end goal is to showcase the
palpable parts of the net we otherwise never think about. And its pretty damn fascinating.

by TINA ESSM AKER

Why Cant We All Just Get Along?

In 1999, Joshua Greenethen a philosophy graduate student at Princeton,
now a prestigious psychology professor at Harvardhad a very fertile idea.
by ROBERT WRIGHT

by CHRIS GAYOM ALI

Uncommon Lessons:

20 Things Ive Learned

At age 26 Dev Basu, CEO of Powered by Search shares a few things hes
learned over the years about living a prosperous and purposeful life.
by DEV BASU

n
o
i
t
c
n
i
t
x
The E
yChildhood
by HAYLEY EICHENBAUM

Childhood is becoming an endangered

concept. Over the last century it can be seen
that the behavior, language, attitudes, and
desireseven the physical appearance
of adults and children are becoming
increasingly indistinguishable. In order to
demonstrate this, its imperative to clarify the
journey that childhood has taken throughout
the course of history. What defines the
parameters of childhood, or rather, what
does it mean to be an adult? When and
where do these two worlds intersect?
By answering these questions, the
importance of preserving the realm of
childhood becomes evident. Little is
known about the attitudes toward children
in antiquity. The Greeks gave us a
foreshadowing of the idea of childhood.
They were ambivalent, perhaps even
confused about the concept. Despite
this obscurity, they were unswervingly
passionate about education. Romans
borrowed the Greek notion of schooling
and went on to develop an awareness of
childhood that surpassed the Greek idea.
The Roman rhetorician Quintilian played a
substantial role in the defining of childhood.
He emphasized that children are special
beings that require protection, nurturing,
schooling, and freedom from adult secrets
(particularly sexual secrets) (Postman 9).
During this era the concept of shame
emerges; specifically its relationship to

childhood. The idea of shame rests, in part,

on secrets. Secrets encompass the mysteries,
contradictions, violence, and tragedy
of adulthood. Quintilian expressed that
childhood cannot exist without an established
understanding of shame. In this case, shame
is comparable to civilized behavior; Children
have a tendency to demonstrate shameless
behavior therefore adults must demonstrate
controlled behavior. There is a pressure to
privatize adult impulses around younger
parties. This leads to the realization that
children require protection (Miller 63).
The Romans grasped this point, although,
apparently, not all of them and not enough
of them. It wasnt until three centuries after
Quintilian in AD 374 that the first known law
prohibiting infanticide was sanctioned. This
indicates a sensitivity to the specific arena
that is childhood. After the Romans, however,
it appears that all delineations of childhood
begin to deteriorate (Postman 11). This
deterioration was due, in large part, to a
noticeable decline in literacy levels. After the
collapse of the Roman Empire followed by
Europes descent into the Dark and Middle
Ages, a disregard for education develops.
The disappearance of literacy can be
attributed to several phenomena. During this
point in time the styles of writing and the
letters of the alphabet multiplied, the shapes
becoming complicated and obscured. As
a consequence the readers capacities to

6
interpret it disappeared, and a condition
called craft literacy took over. Craft literacy
describes a circumstance where the art of
reading is restricted to a few who form a
privileged class. Its counter-condition is social
literacya state where most people can
and do read. It can be stated that the Roman
Church was not unaware of the benefits of
craft literacy as a means of keeping control
over a large and diverse population. Thus,
Europe returned to an instinctive condition
of human communication, dominated by
talk and reinforced by song (Aries 31).
This fateful transition directly leads to an
evaporation of childhood. As essayist
Neil Postman declares: Reading makes
it possible to enter a non-observed and
abstract world of knowledge; it creates a
split between those who cannot read and
those who can. Reading is the scourge of
childhood because, in a sense, it creates
adulthood. Literature of all kindsincluding
maps, charts, contracts, and deeds
collects and keeps valuable secrets.
Thus, in a literate world to be an adult
implies having access to cultural secrets
codified in unnatural symbols. In a literate
world children must become adults.
The idea of shame hinges on secrets, as
Quintilian knew. It was considered shameful
to reveal these secrets too indiscriminately. In
the modern world, as children move toward
adulthood these secrets are revealed to them
through education and experience. But such
an idea is possible only in an atmosphere
where there is a strong division between the
adult and the child, and where there are
institutions that articulate that distinction.
The medieval world made no such distinction
and had no such institutions. Where literacy
is valued there are schools, and where there
are schools the concept of childhood thrives.
The invention of the printing press in the 15th
century brought upon a shift in paradigms.
It created a new definition of adulthood
based on reading competence and, as a
result, a new ideation of childhood based
on reading incompetence. The resurgence
of learning and classical culture in the 13th
century had triggered a craving for books.
Additionally, the growth of commerce and
of the age of exploration generated a need
for printed materials. The printing press had
generated a knowledge explosion, and
craft literacy evolves into social literacy. To
be a fully functioning adult required one to
go beyond custom and memory into worlds
not previously contemplated. The Literate
Man had been established (Eisenstein 22).
As childhoods journey enters the 17th
and 18th centuries a heightened sense of
government responsibility for the welfare

e
h
t
s
i
g
n
i
d
Rea
ood
h
d
l
i
h
c
f
o
scourge
,
e
s
n
e
s
a
n
i
because,
.
d
o
o
h
t
l
u
d
a
it creates
of children arises. New legislations were
enacted to protect children and Europe
developed a more compassionate regard
of childhood: The child became an
object of respecta special creature with
a different nature and different needs,
which required separation and protection
from the adult world (Postman 37).
A major contributor to this shift was
the English philosopher and physician
John Locke. Locke saw the connections
between book learning and childhood.
He proposed a form of education that
treated the child as a precious resource
while still demanding attention to the childs
intellectual development and capacity
for self-control. Locke also promoted the
Tabula Rasa theory, which encompasses
the notion that at birth the mind is a blank
tabletthus, a heavy responsibility falls to
the parents, teachers, and government for
what is written on the mind (Postman 32).
This reintroduced the concepts of shame
and guilt in association to adult and child
obligations. Another influential figure in the
development of childhood was the Genevan
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He
expressed that the psychology of a child
was fundamentally different from that of
adults. In a view that differed from Locke,
Rousseau suggested that a childs intellectual
and emotional life can be deadened by selfcontrol and shame; childhood is the stage
of life when man most closely relates to
the state of nature. According to Rousseau
the candor, understanding, curiosity, and
spontaneity of a child can be suppressed
by structure and education (Postman 60).
Locke and Rousseau shaped childhood in
the New World. The Protestant conception
of childhood, also known as the Lockean
belief, maintained that the child is an
unformed person who through literacy,
education, reason, self-control, and shame
may be made into a civilized adult. For
those who followed this concept, education
was viewed as an addition to self-quality.
On the other end of the spectrum was the
Romantic perception of childhood, also

known as the Rousseauian belief. This stance

viewed education as a deduction of self
qualitya way to suffocate the creativity of
childhood. A strong example of the Romantic
conception of childhood is Mark Twains The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Despite the
differences among the beliefs, both platforms
led to the establishment of new associations
aimed to benefit the wellbeing of children.
For instance, the National Education
Association was founded in 1857,
followed by the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children (1875), and the Society for the
Study of Child Nature (1890). Research
indicates that childhoodas a universal
conceptexperiences a real highpoint
between 1850 and 1950. During this
time, successful attempts were made to get
children out of factories and into school,

Freud and Dewey operated, 100 laws

were passed that classified children as
qualitatively different from adults and
offered protection from the idiosyncrasies
of adulthood (Aries 79). This was also
the period in which the stereotype of the
modern family was cast; a period in which
adults developed the psychic mechanisms
that allow for a full measure of empathy,
tenderness, and responsibility toward
childrenthis is a huge mental evolution.
However, as war and media began to take
over in the 20th century, a major disruption
in the progression of childhood occurs.
The News Industry took off, coupled with
a wave of invention, and information was
transformed from a personal possession to a
commodity of worldwide value. The camera,
telephone, film, radio, and television not

media moves literacy to the periphery of

culture, different attitude and character traits
come to be valued and a new definition
of adulthood emergesor rather, a
hybridization of the two realms occurs.
In modern culture, there is a phenomena
revolving around the adultified child and
the childified adult (Postman 138). Children
are increasingly anxious to grow up while
adults are increasingly hesitant to grow
up. This confusion threatens our culture,
as the whimsies of childhood are wasted
and the responsibilities of adulthood are
neglected. Childhood, as a whole entity,
has experienced many tribulations over the
course of history. It has become clear that
the survival of childhood depends on the
survival of literacy, education, protective
laws, and adult compassion and obligation.

The child is understood a

s having its
own rules x developmen
t, s a charm,
curiosity, and exuberance
that must not
be strangledindeed, is st
rangledat
the risk of losing mature a
dulthood.
and into their own clothing, furniture,
literature, games, and social world (Aries
54). This highpoint is fueled in part by
infamous neurologist Sigmund Freud and
philosopher John Dewey. Postman asserts:
Freud and Dewey crystallized the basic
paradigm of childhood that had been
forming since the printing press: the child
as schoolboy or schoolgirl whose self
and individuality must be preserved by
nurturing, whose capacity for self-control,
deferred gratification, and logical thought
must be extended, whose knowledge of
life must be under the control of adults.
At the same time, the child is understood
as having its own rules for development,
and a charm, curiosity, and exuberance
that must not be strangledindeed, is
strangledat the risk of losing mature
adulthood. During the time in which

only transformed the world of information

but the world of children as well.
These electronic and graphic revolutions
represented a powerful assault on
language and literacy. For example,
television tends to make the rigors of
literate education irrelevant; it requires no
instruction to grasp its form; it does not
make complex demands on the mind;
it does not segregate its audience. In
essence, electric media cannot withhold
any secrets, and, without secrets there is
no childhood. Suddenly the mysteries of
sexuality and violence are accessible to
everyone, and as a result, the innocence
of childhood dissolves. It is evident
that the media has the ability to uproot
childhood through its form and context. It
can be seen in the merging of taste and
style of children and adults. As electric

When any one of these components is

taken out, the entire realm of childhood is
threatened. Its important to preserve this
realm in order to ensure a healthy and
secure future. In the eloquent words of Neil
Postman, children are the living messages
we send to a time we will not see.
Works cited:
Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood. New York:
Random House, Vintage Books, 1962.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press
As an Agent of Change. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Miller, Alice. The Drama of the Gifted Child. New York: Basic Books, 1981.
Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New
York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1982.

p h o t o s by
E M I LY E B E R T

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11
Describe your path to what youre
doing now as an editor and writer.
I started Brain Pickings when I was still
in college because I felt unstimulated by
the experience of higher education. The
enormous lecture classes of 400 people,
professors who didnt know students names,
reading off of PowerPoint presentations, and
assigning reading to be done at home
none of that was my idea of personal
growth and enrichment. I started learning
and reading about things on my own and
Brain Pickings was a record of that.
At the time, I was also paying my way
through school by working at a small ad
agency, in addition to three other part-time
jobs. I noticed that what the guys were
circulating around the office for inspiration
was stuff from within the ad industry.
I didnt believe that was how creativity
worked. I started sending out an email every
Friday including five things that had nothing
to do with advertising, but that I thought were
meaningful, interesting, or importantand
not just cool. I noticed that the guys were
forwarding those emails to other people and
I thought that maybe there was an intellectual
hunger for that sort of cross-disciplinary
curiosity and self-directed learning.

by TINA ESSM AKER

Maria Popova is the founder and editor

of Brain Pickings, has written for Wired
UK, The Atlantic, Nieman Journalism
Lab, the New York Times, and Design
Observer, among others, and is an
MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

On top of my four jobs and full university

course load, I enrolled in a night class to
learn very basic web design and I took Brain
Pickings online. That was before Wordpress
was mainstream, so I was hard-coding
static HTML pages every Friday, taking
them down, and putting up the new ones.
Eventually, I moved it over to Wordpress
and its grown pretty organically. Ive never
been too strategic about it and that whole
game of social marketing is something Ive
never been deliberate about. To this day, I
just write about things that interest and inspire
me as well as things that I think are important
to be preserved. Thats that, I guess.
To this day, I just write about things that
interest and inspire me as well as things that
I think are important to be preserved.Maria
is the founder and editor of Brain Pickings,
a site which, in her own words, offers
cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers and
things you didnt know you were interested
in until you are. Theres also a newsletter.
Where did you grow up?
I was born in Bulgaria and grew up
there. I moved to the US for college.
How was creativity a part
of your childhood there?
Ive always been very visually driven. Bear
in mind that I grew up during communism

and during my early childhood, there wasnt

much available; I didnt have crayons or a
lot of other things. Perhaps the best present
ever given to me was from my uncle, who
is an architect. Right after communism
fell, he gave me a drawing kit that came
in a suitcase and had crayons, pencils,
rulers, watercolors, and other paints.
I didnt read a lot myself, but my
grandmother, who is very intellectual,
would read to me. I was also very
fascinated by her encyclopediasshe
had a whole collection of them. With the
Internet, I think were losing the ability to
learn about something random that we
didnt know we were looking for. Thats
what encyclopedias are great at.
Did you have an aha moment
when you knew that editing and
curating, for lack of a better term,
was something you wanted to do?
Not at all. I also dont believe in the terrible,
toxic myth of the aha moment. Progress
is incremental for us, both as individual
creative beings and together as a society
and civilization. The flower doesnt go
from bud to blossom in one spritely burst.
Its just that culturally, we are not interested
in the tedium of the blossoming. And yet
thats where all the real magic is in the
making of ones character and destiny.
Progress is incremental for us, both as
individual creative beings and together as a
society and civilization. The flower doesnt
go from bud to blossom in one spritely
burst. Its just that culturally, we are not
interested in the tedium of the blossoming.
I really appreciate what you
just said. We see people who
are successful and often think it
happened overnight, but thats
usually not the case. Individuals,
especially young people starting
out, seem to believe that their
careers should take off quickly
and when that doesnt happen,
they get discouraged. But theres a
lot of hard work that has to be put
in behind the scenes and no one is
necessarily going to commend you
or say, Great job. Keep going.
You just have to keep doing it.
Yeah, its funny. Right before this interview,
I was over at Hyperakt, the design studio.
They do these great lunch talks and my
friend Debbie Millman, who runs the
wonderful Design Matters podcast, spoke
today. At the Q & A after her talk, she
cited this anecdote, which is basically what
you just said. She had just given a talk at
the Tyler School of Art and this young

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13

student asked, How do I get people to

visit my blog? Im very frustrated with it.
Debbie asked her, How long have you
been doing it? and the student sincerely
and earnestly replied, A month.

but Ive tried to make things as seamless

and easy and digestible as possible. At
the end of the day, Brain Pickings is about
the ideas and content and not at all about
the bells and whistles surrounding it.

I think if you have a great idea and are

intelligent and articulate about it, people will
gravitate toward it sooner or later. But also,
Ive been doing what I do for seven years
and I never started it with the notion that it
would be my life. It is my life now and it will
continue to be, but I couldnt have predicted
it. I dont believe that the best work happens
when you gun for a specific outcomeI
just dont think thats how it works.

I like that youve made Brain

Pickings accessible to everyone.

You mentioned that youve been

doing Brain Pickings for seven
years. For our readers who
might not be familiar with it,
would you elaborate on how
its grown over the years?
Conceptually, it has changed very, very
little. Granted, Ive grown a lot as a
person and because its such a personal
thing, my interests and my intellectual
and creative curiosities have changed.
However, the nature of what I write about
and more importantly, why I write about
what I write about has not changed.
Technically speaking, the platforms have
changed as it started with an email
newsletter, went to an HTML site, and then
to Wordpress with some cosmetic redesigns
along the way. I also have a newsletter
again, which was almost an afterthought.
In 2009, a friend nudged me to do it and
now its become pretty sizable. Its strange
because the demographic of people who
read Brain Pickings is very diverse, so I
get high school students, but alsoand
I dont know whyI have a pretty large
chunk of older people, including a large
portion of retired educators. Now, many
of the people who subscribe to the email
newsletter are older and many of them
dont realize the newsletter is based on
the site or realize that the site even exists.
Observing this organic journey has been
very educational in understanding how
people relate to knowledge and how they
choose to absorb what they absorb. My
philosophy and the one thing Ive been
strategic and deliberate about from the
beginning is reader firstI dont want
anything to tell people how to engage
with what they want to engage with. I
dont believe in slideshows, pagination,
truncated RSS feeds, paywalls, and all
these things that basically punish your
most loyal readers. Im just one person; I
cant optimize everything to be perfect,

Yes. Well, I guess there are two things Ive

been very strict about since the beginning.
The first I already mentioned and the second
is that I dont run ads; I dont believe in
ad-supported media and journalism, so the
site is funded by readers through donations.
Im a big believer in the pay what you
will model; if you see value in it, you give
whatever value you see. I think this model
incentivizes integrity and encourages people
to do work they actually care about.
Have you had any mentors
along the way?
Not directly that I can think of. There
are people whose work I admire in
different ways, but no mentors per se.
Susan Sontag on love (cropped), based on
the second volume of Sontags published
diaries. Edited by Maria Popova and
illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton.
I think you need to be a little in love
not necessarily in a romantic sense,
although that helpsbut to be in love
with the reality of your own life in order
to produce beautiful and meaningful
and intelligent things creatively.
Has there been a point in your
life when you decided you had to
take a big risk to move forward?
Professionally, yes. When I graduated
college out of the factory that is the Ivy
League system, all the recruiters came
to offer students big, corporate jobs.
Of course, I had all these offers in
marketing and management and banking.
It was interesting because it was a risk
in the sense that I grew up being really
financially challenged and my family
was still in Bulgaria, a country on a very
different income scale, and they were
not well off either. To them, getting a job
offer with a big paycheck attached to
it was a big deal. Those were numbers
that would be a fortune in Bulgaria.
But for me, the consideration was, Do I
want to bury myself in a corporate job that
Im going to spent 80% of my waking hours
at and hope that the money it gives me will
make the other 20% of my life better, even
though Im burned out? Or, do I want to do
something that makes me happy to wake

up to and happy to go to sleep having

done and let the financial part figure itself
out? In fact, when I was first running Brain
Pickings in my sophomore and junior years
of college, I already had a bunch of job
offers. Whats funny is that I couldnt afford
to take that basic web design night class
I mentioned earlier. In order to pay for it, I
saved money by eating store brand oatmeal
and canned tuna for breakfast, lunch, and
dinner for three weeks until I had enough
money to pay for the class. (laughing) That
didnt feel like a sacrifice or risk at the
timeit just felt like what I needed to do
to be happy and Im glad I did it. I cant
imagine having done it any other way.

Where did you go to school?

UPenn.
Did you move to New
York after school?
No. I stayed there for about a
year working at that creative shop
where I started Brain Pickings.
In the past decade, my life has been
plagued by immigration bullshit and
bureaucracy. In 2007 and 2008, there was
this thing nicknamed Visa Gate, which was
a government goof that affected two-thirds
of people working on H1B Visas here. That
was the type of visa I was trying to get, so I
was affected and had to pack up my entire

life, say goodbye to my friends, and leave.

I went back to Europe and lived in Bulgaria,
but also spent quite a bit of time in London.
I was in exile there for a little over a year
until I couldnt take it anymore. Culturally, it
was draining me; it was so negative and
the people and ideas and events I wanted
to be around were ten time zones away.
Eventually, I got an offer from an ad agency
in LA and even though I didnt want to
work in advertising, it was a way in. Also,
it was so loose; they just basically wanted
me involved and I was able to create my
own job. They were really smart and good
people, but I had a cognitive dissonance
with being in advertising. So, I moved to LA
without having ever been there and having
always loathed it from a distance. On day

two, I just knew it wasnt my thing. Ive

chosen not to drive; I dont want to learn.
Instead, I bike. After being a cyclist in LA,
I have a body full of marks to show for it. I
also felt lonely, isolated, and unhappy there.
Laurie Coots, the CMO of TBWAthe
agencytook me under her wing and
helped me move to the New York office.
She was so gracious about all of it and
made sure I was happy. After I moved
to New York, there was such a shift in
my quality of lifethere was creative
stimulation and a massive exhale because
I was no longer feeling isolated.
The other thing is that I love books. Between
the time I left Philly and the time I moved
to NY, I had lived in 12 apartments in
five cities, on two continents and three
coastsall in less than two years. When
you move that much, you cant have books.

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15

All my books were in storage and I wasnt

getting new books. In the year I spent
in Bulgaria, I couldnt even get eBooks;
there wasnt an iPad then. I felt deprived.
Once I moved to NY, I got all my books
back and I started getting a ton of new
books. Now, Im buried in books.

be true to our sense of right and wrong,

our sense of purpose and meaning. Thats
how we contribute to the world. Anyone
who is able to do that for him or herself is
already contributing a great deal of human
potential into our collective, shared pool
of humanity. Thats my litmus test, I guess.

So now youre staying put in NY?

Are you satisfied creatively?

Well, I just dealt with another immigration

issue in the spring when I quit the ad agency
and tried to transfer my visa to my new
employer, an education startup called Lore.
Transferring your visa is supposed to be
a seamless process, but something went
wrong and I lost it and had to leave again.
Thankfully it was resolved fairly quickly.

Oh, completely.

It is a really disorienting thing to feel like

everything youve built for yourselfyour
whole lifecan be pulled out from under
your feet by no fault of your own. Its an
arbitrary force thats always there and its
really, really frustrating and disempowering.
If it were up to me, I would never move
away from NY, but I dont trust the
immigration system at all, so Im cautious.
Are your family and friends
supportive of what you do?
My friends, the only important people
in my life, Ive met through what I do.
Theyre absolutely supportive.
My family tries to understand it and theyre
always supportive, but Im not convinced
they actually get what it is I do. I dont
even know how to articulate it to myself
most days, but thats okay because I
dont need to. I just need to do it and be
fulfilled by it and for them, thats enough.
Are you at Studiomates?
I am in theory, although Im so busy that
Im barely there. Tina jokes that I use it
as my mail room. (laughing) Its so close
to where I live, but its just that every
second is accounted for somehow.
Do you feel a responsibility
to contribute to something
bigger than yourself?
Well, isnt that every persons ultimate
measure of happiness on some level,
consciously or subconsciously? Its very
challenging to talk about these things that
are very deep and existential without it
sounding contrived or dishing out clichs,
but at the end of the day, the reason
clichs exist is that theyre true. Thats all
one big disclaimer to what Im about to
say, which is that I truly, truly believe that
our first responsibility is to ourselvesto

That said, is there anything youre interested

in exploring in the next 5 to 10 years?
Well, like I said, I dont believe in planning
for things. I believe in doing what inspires
you and seeing how it grows organically.
If you could give a piece of advice
to a young creative starting
out, what would you say?
Again, this is a clich, but its been true
for me. Dont let other peoples ideas of
success and good or meaningful work filter
your perception of what you want to do.
Listen to your heart and minds purpose;
keep listening to that and even when the
shoulds get really loud, try to stay in
touch with what you hear within yourself.
Youve talked a lot about New
York. How does living there
impact your creativity?
The novelist William Gibson has a wonderful
term, personal micro-culture, by which he
means all the things you surround yourself
withpeople, books, and any kind of
ideological input. Those things essentially
shape what you think and care about.
Living in NY, my personal micro-culture is
that much richer. But mostly, I dont have a
separation between work and life; I dont
believe in the idea of work-life balance. The
people in my personal life are also very
much entrenched in what I do professionally
and creatively. Being in NY and not feeling
isolated is wonderful. Having true friends
who are aligned with what I care about, but
who are also different enough to broaden
my curiosity and worldview, is enormous
to me. Im so grateful for it every day.
It sounds like its important to
you to be part of a creative
community of people?
Yes, but Im wary of the word community
because it sounds very organized. I think
theres a value in surrounding yourself with
people who stimulate and challenge you,
who dont just agree with you all the time.
But I think the most important thing is to
feel safe, seen, and understood by the
people around you. I believe it was Bill

Nye who said thiseveryone in your life

knows something you dont. And I believe
its important to live in that unknown and
to welcome and celebrate it. That can
only happen when you actually come into
contact with people and not in superficial
ways, but when you deeply connect with
them. Thats really important to me.
I agree. Its about those
meaningful, face-to-face
connections, which have been
really important for us since
moving to New York and meeting
people who we can connect
with beyond online interactions.
Thats been life-giving for us.
I think thats so, so important. Its funny
because, in the past year, Ive been the
subject of some online trolling and a lot of it
tends to be personal rather than ideological.
One thing people would throw out a lot
is, All this time on Twitteryou dont have
a personal life, or conflating being active
on the social web as reducing all of your
social life to that. I kind of chuckle at that
stuff because I am so profoundly grateful for
my friendships and the deep relationships I
have in my life are the reason for everything
for me. Kurt Vonnegut said, Write to please
just one person, and I think you need to
be a little in lovenot necessarily in a
romantic sense, although that helpsbut
to be in love with the reality of your own
life in order to produce beautiful and
meaningful and intelligent things creatively.
This might be a tough
question. What does a typical
day look like for you?
(laughing) Because the volume of what I
need to get done in a day is so enormous,
Im super disciplined and theres a routine
to my day that helps center and move me
along. Its pretty much always the same day.
I get up in the morning and preschedule
some of my tweets and do very mild email.
Then I head to the gym where I do my
long-form reading on the iPad while on the
elliptical. I come back, have breakfast, and
start writing. I write three articles a day
usually two shorter ones and one longerso
I try to write the longer one in the first half
of the day before things get too crazy.
In the afternoon, I do more reading and
preschedule the second half of my tweets.
In the evening, I do yoga or meditation
and then I usually have some sort of event
or a one-on-one with a friend, which is my
preferred mode of connecting. When I get
home, sometime between 10pm and 1am, I
write the remainder of what I havent finished.

Thats a very full day. Now

for some lighter questions.
Current album on repeat?

ever evolving. To anchor yourself with

such certainty to something like an all-time
favorite is the opposite of progress.

Sugaring Season, the new Beth Orton

album, is amazing. This isnt new anymore,
but Love This Giant, the St. Vincent and
David Byrne album has been on repeat
for a long time. Im also an enormous lover
of covers. Ive been on a kick of listening
to covers of Talking Heads This Must
Be the Place (Naive Melody) lately.

I will say this. Ive been on a spree and

really enjoying the diaries of Anas Nin
and I know theyll be a big part of my life
forever. She started writing when she was
11 years old and wrote until she died.
There are 16 volumes and Im only up to
the fifth one. The diaries are personal, but
she writes them as a nonfiction narrator and
theyre essentially philosophy and thoughts
on creativity and life. She also meets all
these historical figures and gives descriptions
that get to the core of who that human
being is. I am very moved by her writing.

You probably dont have

time to TV or movies. Do
you watch anything?
No.
Oh, this is going to be the
toughest question I ask you. Do
you have a favorite book?
Im not answering that question. (laughing)
Do you have a favorite
book from childhood?
I do, but thats irrelevant because part
of the beauty of intellectual life is that its

Do you have a favorite food?

I eat the same things every single
day. I wouldnt call them favorites
its more of a functional thing. I do
love all seafood except oysters.

What kind of legacy do

you hope to leave?
I dont really care about legacy per se.
I want to be fulfilled while Im living and
when I die, its what people make of it. I
would hope its something thats meaningful
to other people, but I also think legacy is
caught up in all this ideology of afterlife
and culturally, we spend too much time
expecting the next moment to bring what
this one is missing. That distracts from, to
use Anas Nins term, the art of living. I
dont want to think about legacy; I want to
think about doing things that are meaningful
today and thats plenty for me. Above
all, I wholeheartedly believe Larkin put it
best: What will survive of us is love.
Originally featured on The Great Discontent, November 2012.
Follow Maria on brainpickings.org.

16

Why

CAN T

WE ALL

JUST
get

ALONG?
The Uncertain
Biological Basis
of Morality
by ROBERT WRIGHT

In 1999, Joshua Greenethen

a philosophy graduate student
at Princeton, now a prestigious
psychology professor at Harvard
had a very fertile idea.
He took a pretty well-known philosophical
thought experiment and infused it with
technology in a way that turned it into a
very well-known philosophical thought
experimenteasily the best-known, mostpondered such mental exercise of our time.
In the process, he raised doubts about the
rationality of human moral judgment.
The thought experimentcalled the trolley
problemhas over the past few years gotten
enough attention to be approaching needs no
introduction status. But its not quite there, so:
An out-of-control trolley is headed for five people
who will surely die unless you pull a lever that
diverts it onto a track where it will instead kill one
person. Would youshould youpull the lever?
Now rewind the tape and suppose that you
could avert the five deaths not by pulling a
lever, but by pushing a very large man off a
footbridge and onto the track, where his body
would slow the train to a halt just in time to save
everyoneexcept, of course, him. Would you
do that? And, if you say yes the first time and no
the second (as many people do), whats your
rationale? Isnt it a one-for-five swap either way?
Greenes inspiration was to do brain scans
of people while they thought about the trolley
problem. The results suggested that people
who refused to save five lives by pushing
an innocent bystander to his death were
swayed by emotional parts of their brains,
whereas people who chose the more utilitarian
solutionkeep as many people alive as
possibleshowed more activity in parts of
the brain associated with logical thought.
If you put Greenes findings in general form
human reasoning is sometimes more about
gut feeling than about logicthey are part
of a wave of behavioral-science research
that in recent years has raised doubts about
how much trust your brain deserves. The
best-seller lists have featured such books as
Predictably Irrational, by the Duke psychologist
Dan Ariely, and Thinking, Fast and Slow, in
which the Princeton psychologist and Nobel
laureate Daniel Kahneman covers acres of
research into humanitys logical ineptitude.
But theres a difference between this work and
Greenes work. Ariely and Kahneman spend
lots of time in their books on financial and
other mundane decisions, whereas Greene
is focusing on moral matters. Its one thing to
say Isnt it crazy that youll drive 10 miles to
save $50 on a $100 purchase but not to save
$50 on a $500 purchase? Its another thing

18
to say Isnt it crazy that youll dutifully kill a
guy by pulling a lever but refuse on principle
to give him a nudge that leads to the same
outcome? The first question is about selfhelp. The second is about something more.
How much more? To judge by Greenes new
book, a whole lot more. Its called Moral Tribes:
Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us
and Themand, in case the title alone doesnt
convince you that the stakes are high, Greene
writes that his book is about the central tragedy
of modern life. Hes not alone in thinking this
is high-gravitas stuff. The Yale psychologist
Paul Bloom, who also studies the biological
basis of morality, has a new book called
Just Babies, about the emergence of moral
inclinations in infants and toddlers. Hes chosen
the subtitle The Origins of Good and Evil.
I have a fairly robust immune response to bookmarketing hype, but in this case its showing
no signs of activity. The well-documented
human knack for bigotry, conflict, and atrocity
must have something to do with the human
mind, and relevant parts of the mind are
indeed coming into focusnot just thanks
to the revolution in brain scanning, or even
advances in neuroscience more broadly, but
also thanks to clever psychology experiments
and a clearer understanding of the evolutionary
forces that shaped human nature. Maybe were
approaching a point where we can actually
harness this knowledge, make radical progress
in how we treat one another, and become
a species worthy of the title Homosapiens.

19
on both the domestic and international fronts,
bringing reason to discussions about abortion
and gay rights; calming tensions between
India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine; and
so on. Greenes diagnosis is, at its foundation,
Darwinian: the impulses and inclinations that
shape moral discourse are legacies of natural
selection, rooted in our genes. Many of them
are with us today because they helped our
ancestors realize the benefits of cooperation.
As a result, people are pretty good at getting
along with one another, and supporting basic
ethical rules that keep societies humming.
Anyone who doubts that basic moral impulses
are innate will have Paul Blooms book to
contend with. He synthesizes researchmuch
of it done by him and his wife, Karen Wynn
demonstrating that an array of morally relevant
inclinations show up in infants and toddlers. His
list of natural moral endowments includes some
capacity to distinguish between kind and cruel
actions, as well as empathy and compassion
suffering at the pain of those around us and the
wish to make this pain go away. Blooms work
has also documented a rudimentary sense of
justicea desire to see good actions rewarded
and bad actions punished.

Different Perspectives
So if were such moral animals, why all the
strife? Joshua Greenes answer is appealingly
simple. He says the problem is that we were
designed to get along together in a particular
contextrelatively small hunter-gatherer

The impulses and inclinations

that shape moral discourse are
legacies of natural selection,
rooted in our genes.
Both Bloom and Greene evince concern for
the human predicament; both authors would
like to do something about it; and both have
ideas about what that something should
be. But only Greenes book brings the word
messianic to mind. His concern is emphatic, his
diagnosis precise, and his plan of action very,
very ambitious. The salvation of humankind
is possible, but its going to take concerted
effort. Greene offers readers the motivation
and opportunity to join forces with like-minded
others, the chance to support what he calls
a metamorality. And as this metamorality
spreads, we can expect to solve problems

societies. Our brains are good at reconciling

us to groups were part of, but theyre less
good at getting groups to make compromises
with one another. Morality did not evolve to
promote universal cooperation, he writes.
Greene seems to think this wouldnt be such a
big problem if we were still living in the Stone
Age, back when sparse population meant
that groups didnt bump into one another
muchand when, anyway, a neighboring
village might share your language and your
culture and maybe even include some of your
kin. But the modern world smushes groups
together and they have different values.

This factthat different groups view life from

very different moral perspectivesis what
Greene calls the Tragedy of Commonsense
Morality. He opens his book with a parable
in which different tribes subscribing to different
values cant get along and says, They fight
not because they are fundamentally selfish
but because they have incompatible visions
of what a moral society should be.
If this diversity of moral codes is indeed the big
problem, one solution suggests itself: get rid of
the diversity. We need a common currency,
a unified system for weighing values, Greene
writes. What we lack, I think, is a coherent
global moral philosophy, one that can resolve
disagreements among competing moral tribes.
One question you confront if youre arguing for a
single planetary moral philosophy: Which moral
philosophy should we use?
For starters, there are those trolley-problem
brain scans. Recall that the people who
opted for the utilitarian solution were less
under the sway of the emotional parts of their
brain than the people who resisted it. And
isnt emotion something we generally try to
avoid when conflicting groups are hammering
out an understanding they can live with?
The reason isnt just that emotions can flare out
of control. If groups are going to talk out their
differences, they have to be able to, well, talk
about them. And if the foundation of a moral
intuition is just a feeling, theres not much to
talk about. This point was driven home by the
psychologist Jonathan Haidt in an influential
2001 paper called The Emotional Dog and
Its Rational Tail (which approvingly cited
Greenes then-new trolley-problem research). In
arguing that our moral beliefs are grounded in
feeling more than reason, Haidt documented
moral dumbfoundingthe difficulty people
may have in explaining why exactly they
believe that, say, homosexuality is wrong.
If everyone were a utilitarian, dumb-foundedness
wouldnt be a problem. No one would say
things like I dont know, two guys having sex
just seems icky! Rather, the different tribes
would argue about which moral arrangements
would create the most happiness. Sure, the
arguments would get complicated, but at least
they would rest ultimately on a single value
everyone agrees is valuable: happiness.
You may ask: How do you get devout
Christians, Jews, and Muslims to abandon their
religiously based value systems? Greene realizes
that this isnt a summer-vacation project, and I
dont think practicality is the core problem with
his plan. I think the big problem comes earlier,
in the diagnosis phase: overestimating the role
played by divergent values. Consider one of
Greenes examples. Its true that some Jews
believe God reserved the West Bank for them.

i l l u s t r a t i o n s by
MELISSA JOHNSON

But its also true that this beliefand religious

belief in generalhas had very little to do with
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Zionism was a
largely secular movement, featuring minimal
God talk, and the Arab resistance to it wasnt
particularly religious. After the Palestinian
Sirhan, enraged by Robert F. Kennedys pledge
to send arms to Israel, assassinated Kennedy,
he said he had done it for my country,
not my religion. And, anyway, his religion
was the same as Kennedys: Christianity.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at its root a
conflict between two peoples who think theyre
entitled to the same piece of land. When they
argue about this, they dont generally posit
different ethical principles of land ownership.
They posit different versions of historydifferent
views on how many Arabs were living in
Palestine before 1948, on who started the
fighting that resulted in many Arabs leaving the
area, on which side did which horrible things
to the other side first, and so on. Its not clear
why these arguments over facts would change
if both groups were godless utilitarians. In fact,
Greenes own book suggests they wouldnt.
Notwithstanding its central argument, it includes
lots of evidence that often the source of human

conflict isnt different moral systems but rather

a kind of naturally unbalanced perspective.
He cites a study in which Israelis and Arabs
watched the same media coverage of the 1982
Beirut massacre and both groups concluded
that the coverage was biased against their
side. Any suspicion that this discrepancy was
grounded in distinctive Jewish or Arab or
Muslim values is deflated by another finding
he cites, from the classic 19354 study in
which Princeton and Dartmouth students,
after watching a particularly rough PrincetonDartmouth football game, reached sharply
different conclusions about which side had
played dirtier. Was the problem here a yawning
gap between the value systems prevailing
at Princeton and Dartmouth in the 1950s?
The problem was that both groups consisted
of human beings. As such, they suffered from
a deep biasa tendency to overestimate their
teams virtue, magnify their grievances, and
do the reverse with their rivals. This bias seems
to have been built into our species by natural
selectionat least, thats the consensus among
evolutionary psychologists. This means that
some self-serving biases are rooted in what
Greene presents as the good news about our

evolutionary past: that people are designed

by natural selection to extract the benefits of
cooperating with other people. Yes, you and
your three fellow hunter-gatherers will all be
better off if you cooperate on a hunt to kill an
animal none of you could kill individually. But
when it comes time to divvy up the meat, its
better to get 30 percent than 25 percent. So
were naturally good bargainerswith ready
access to facts that support our worthiness and
less-ready access to facts that dont; we seem
designed to believe in our entitlement.

Opposite Worlds
If real-world examples of our self-serving biases
seem hard to find, thats because theyre
supposed to be hard to find; the whole idea is
that were not aware of the information these
biases exclude. So, for example, if youre like
the average American, heres a fact you dont
know: in 1953, the United States sponsored
a coup in Iran, overthrowing a democratically
elected government and installing a brutally
repressive regime that ruled for decades.
Iranians, on the other hand, are very aware of
this, which helps explain why, to this day, many
of them are gravely suspicious of American

20

21
be impartial. When you combine judgment
thats naturally biased with the belief that
wrongdoers deserve to suffer, you wind up
with situations like two people sharing the
conviction that the other one deserves to suffer.
Greene and Bloom, and lots of other
scholars, believe the sense of justice to be a
legacy of natural selection, and the logic is
straightforward. For starters, though extracting
the benefits of cooperation involves things
like making overtures to help someone (since
maybe that person will help you down the
road), it also means following up selectively
reciprocating kindnesses extended to you
but not continuing to help those who dont
help you. It may even mean punishing those
who have abused your trust by, say, feigning
friendship only to desert you once theyve
reaped the benefits of your generosity. So the
impulses governing cooperation range from the
gratitude that cements friendships to the sort
of righteous indignation that fuels violence.

intentions. It also helps explain the 1979

takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehranan
event that many Americans no doubt chalk up to
unfathomable religious zealotry. This is the way
the brain works: you forget your sins (or never
recognize them in the first place) and remember
your grievances. As a result, the antagonisms
confronting you may seem mysterious, and you
may be tempted to attribute them to an alien
value system. Indeed, this temptation may itself
be part of our built-in equipment for making our
rivals positions seem groundless. In any event,
viewing values as deeply causal, as Greene
and so many others do, seems to be deeply
human. Its also unfortunate, because, time and
again, that belief keeps us from addressing
the actual issues that underlie conflict.
Many of these self-serving biases fall under
the broader rubric of confirmation biasa
tendency to notice facts consistent with your
thesis and overlook facts that contradict
it. Confirmation bias is generally called a
cognitive bias, not a moral bias, along with
our other funny intellectual quirks. But cognitive
biases can have moral consequences just
as surely as trolley-car intuitions do.
What makes the moral stakes especially high
is the way these biases interact with a feature
of psychology that is more obviously moral
in nature. Namely: the sense of justicethe
intuition that good deeds should be rewarded
and bad deeds should be punished. Rewarding
good behavior increases its frequency, and the
threat of punishment discourages bad behavior.
But this assumes impartial judgmentthat
the punishment will go to those who did the
bad things and the rewards will go to those
who did the good things. And, as weve
just seen, our judgments are designed not to

This polarity may be the origin of what

eventually evolved into a full-fledged sense of
justice, evident in people from an early age.
Bloom shows us 1-year-olds who feel that a
puppet that doesnt play nice with other puppets
should be punishedin fact, theyll personally
do the punishing, by taking the puppets treats
away. It sounds sweet, in that contexthard to
believe that this same impulse, when fused with
natural cognitive biases, can lead to genocide.
Greene doesnt neglect these sorts of impulses
and biases. Indeed, he explains the dark side
of our cooperative machinery and of human
nature generally. This all feeds into his belief that
our brains are wired for tribalism. If indeed
were wired for tribalism, then maybe much of
the problem has less to do with differing moral
visions than with the simple fact that my tribe
is my tribe and your tribe is your tribe. Both
Greene and Bloom cite studies in which people
were randomly divided into two groups and
immediately favored members of their own
group in allocating resourceseven when
they knew the assignment was random.
Of course, for things to get really nasty, you
need more than just the existence of two groups.
The most common explosive additive is the
perception that relations between the groups
are zero-sumthat one groups win is the other
groups loss. In a classic 1950s study mentioned
by Bloom (a study that couldnt be performed
today, given prevailing ethical strictures),
experimenters created deep hostility between
two groups of boys at summer camp by pitting
them against each other in a series of zero-sum
games. The rift was mended by putting the
boys in non-zero-sum situationsgiving them a
common peril, such as a disruption in the water
supply, that they could best confront together.

Zero-Sum
When youre in zero-sum mode and
derogating your rival group, any of its values
that seem different from yours may share
in the derogation. Meanwhile, youll point
to your own tribes distinctive, and clearly
superior, values as a way of shoring up its
solidarity. So outsiders may assume theres
a big argument over values. But that doesnt
mean values are the root of the problem.
The question of how large a role differing
value systems play in human conflict hovers
over some of the worlds most salient tensions.
Many Americans see Muslim terrorists as
motivated by an alien jihadist ideology that
compels militants to either kill infidels or bring
them under the banner of Islam. But what the
jihadists actually say when justifying their
attacks has pretty much nothing to do with
bringing Sharia law to America. Its about the
perception that America is at war with Islam.
Just look at the best-known terrorist bombers and
would-be terrorist bombers who have targeted
the United States since 9/11: the Boston
Marathon bombers, the would-be underwear
bomber, the would-be Times Square bomber,
and the would-be New York subway bombers.
All have explicitly cited as their motivating
grievance one or more of the following: the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, drone strikes
in various Muslim countries, and American
support for Israeli policies toward Palestinians.
Theres no big difference over ethical principle
here. Americans and jihadists agree that
if youre attacked, retaliation is justified (an
extension of the sense of justice, and a belief
for which you could mount a plausible utilitarian
rationale, if forced). The disagreement is over
the facts of the casewhether America has
launched a war on Islam. And so it is with most
of the worlds gravest conflicts. The problem isnt
the lack of, as Greene puts it, a moral language
that members of all tribes can speak. Retributive
justice, for better or worse, is a moral language
spoken around the worldbut it is paired with
a stubborn and lethal bias about who should
be on the receiving end of the retribution.
None of this is to deny the existence of
genuine disputes over values, or to say that
such disputes never matter. Certainly domestic
politics features explicit debates over values,
and herein the realm of abortion and gay
rightsGreenes argument may hold more
water. Im sure there would be less homophobia
if people were driven more by pure reason
not just because they would sidestep scriptural
injunctions, but also because they would
transcend gut reactions against forms of sex
that they themselves dont find enticing.
But even in the domestic arena, the fact that

We seem designed to twist moral

discoursewhatever language
its framed into selfish or tribal
ends, and to remain conveniently
unaware of the twisting.
people fight over values doesnt mean values
are the prime mover. The conflicts may draw
at least as much energy from prior intertribal
tensionsincluding a sense that your group is
threatened by another group, so that the game is
zero-sum. Two decades ago, thenVice President
Dan Quayle paired criticism of abortion
and gay parenting with a warning about the
cultural elite who were said to be foisting such
values on ordinary Americans. That was smart,
because once youre convinced that an enemy
group has contempt for your values, your values
will seem, more than ever, worth fighting for.
And youll do what it takes to fight for them.
But youd do that even ifas in Greenes ideal
worldthe ground rules confined your weapons
to utilitarian argument. Indeed, debates in the
public square over things like gay rights are
already pretty utilitarian. (Is having gay parents
good for children?) Yet the debates remain hard
to resolvein part because utilitarian arguments
can be so creatively hypothetical. (Will the logic
behind gay marriage lead to an acceptance of
polygamyand what effect would that have
on human happiness?) Its enough to make you
wonder how much conflict a moral lingua franca
would really prevent.

The Infamous Lever

Greenes evangelical mission, like many
evangelical missions, is rooted in a not-veryflattering view of human nature. Namely:
some of our deepest moral intuitions are gut
feelings that are with us for no more lofty a
reason than that they helped our ancestors
protect themselves and spread their genes.
Even the emotional aversion to pushing the
guy onto the trolley track (an aversion so deep
that utilitarians overcome it only with effort) isnt
here because natural selection frowned on
pushing people to their death per se. Greene
speculates, rather, that we are averse to
conspicuously harming people because in the
hunter-gatherer environment of our evolution,
that would have invited retaliation from the
victims or their kin or friends. Killing someone
remotely, by pulling a lever, doesnt trigger the
same aversion as low-tech, obvious assault.

In a sense, then, people who obey their moral

intuitions and refrain from pushing the man to
his death are just choosing to cause five deaths
they wont be blamed for rather than one death
they would be blamed for. Not a profile in
moral courage! So you can see why Greene
would like to recruit us to a moral philosophy
that doesnt rest on a bunch of emotional
intuitions. It holds out the hope of helping us
transcend natural selections amoral agenda.
But however dark the view of human nature that
inspired this mission, I fear its not dark enough.
If Greene thinks that getting people to couch
their moral arguments in a highly reasonable
language will make them highly reasonable, I
think hes underestimating the cleverness and
ruthlessness with which our inner animals pursue
natural selections agenda. We seem designed
to twist moral discoursewhatever language
its framed into selfish or tribal ends, and to
remain conveniently unaware of the twisting.
How exactly do you do metacognition? Well,
you could start by pondering all the evidence
that your brain is an embarrassingly misleading
device. Self-doubt can be the first step to moral
improvement. But our biases are so subtle,
alluring, and persistent that converting a wave
of doubt into enduring wisdom takes work. The
most-impressive cases of bias neutralization
Im aware of involve people who have spent
ungodly amounts of timeseveral hours a day
for many yearsin meditative practices that
make them more aware of the workings of their
minds. These people seem much less emotiondriven, much less wrapped up in themselves,
and much less judgmental than, say, I am.
Happily for those of us who cant spare several
hours a day, more-modest progress can be
made by pursuing this mindfulness meditation
in smaller doses. And this practice exploits a
strategy that is common in successful evangelical
missions: using self-help as bait. Loosening the
grip of your emotions can make you happier,
and for many meditators thats the big draw.
The fact that emotionally driven and subtly
self-centered moral judgments loosen their hold
on you as well seems almost like a side effect.

Within various kinds of tribesreligions, nations,

political partiesthere are people urging their
compatriots to see things from a less tribal
perspective, to put themselves in the shoes of
the other, to explore the non-zero-sum prospect
of accommodation. These voices can prevail
without Greenes recommended overhaul of
tribal value systems, and if they do prevail, the
distinctive tribal values that seem so explosively
divisive now will start to seem less so.
This sort of global metacognitive revolution, even
with the assistance its getting from science,
may be a long shot, and it certainly will be
a long, hard slog. But nourishing the seeds
of enlightenment indigenous to the worlds
tribes is a better bet than trying to convert all
the tribes to utilitarianismboth more likely
to succeed, and more effective if it does.
Dont get me wrong: Some of my best friends
are utilitarians. In fact, the utilitarian tribe is
another tribe I belong to. I even once spent
a chapter of a book defending utilitarianism
as the best available moral philosophy. I
just dont think its the key to salvation.
Its tempting for us utilitarians to look around
at people with more emotionally rooted
value systems and think that these primitive
worldviews are what stand in the way of
progress. But if psychology tells us anything,
it is to be suspicious of the intuition that the
other guys are the problem and were not.
Originally featured in The Atlantic, November 2013.
Copyright 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

22

23

Uncommon Findings

BARRIERS TO
CREATIVITY
IN EDUCATION
Exclusive Adobe study reveals
education system is stifling creativity.

Top 3 most
important
steps to
promote
and foster
creativity in
education:

United States

Providing tools and

training to educators
to enable creativity

by TACY TOBRIDGE, Education Programs Lead at Adobe

Adobe released a research study

that reveals the state of creativity in

education. It highlights the importance of

preparing students to be innovators and
how testing and government mandates are

stifling creativity in the classroom.

This international study, Barriers to Creativity

in Education: Educators and Parents Grade
the System, shows there is a growing
concern that the education system itself is
a barrier to developing the creativity that
drives innovation. Parents and educators
agree that todays education system places
too much emphasis on testing and not
enough investment in the training, tools
and time needed to teach creativity.
Among the 4,000 adults, 2,000 were
educators and 2,000 were parents of
students in K-12 and higher education. A
strong majority of the participants across the
United States, United Kingdom, Germany
and Australia, call for a transformation
in the ways schools work. Furthermore,
educators agree that they can do more
to foster creativity with more tools and
training to integrate it into the classroom.
When asked about the most important step
to promote and foster creativity in education,
U.S. respondents cited the need to:
Provide tools and training
to teach creativity

86

30%

18

24%

Making creativity integral

to the curriculum

Reducing mandates
that hinder creativity

UK, Australia,
Germany

23%

Improving curriculum

of parents and educators

22%

believe teaching creativity requires a

transformation in the way schools work.

Providing tools to
educators that enable
creativity more effectively

21

Making creativity integral to the

curriculum and rewarding educators
who inspire students to be creative

Make creativity integral to the curriculum

Reduce mandates that hinder creativity
Originally posted at blogs.adobe.com, June 2013.

Source: Adobe Barriers to Creativity in Education: Educators and Parents Grade the System Study. Study
based on interviews with 4,000 adults, including 2,000 educators of students in K through higher education
and 2,000 parents of children in K through higher education.

The top 3
barriers
to teaching
creativity
according to
parents and
educators:

United States
1. System too reliant
on testing
2. Educators restricted
from straying outside
the curriculum
3. Lack of resources
International Combined
1. Current education
curriculum
2. Misunderstanding of the
importance of creativity
in education
3. Lack of resources and
restriction from straying
outside the curriculum (tied)

24

25

Uncommon Interview

SHULI
HALLAK:
INVISIBLE
NETWORKS

Lets backtrack a bit. Why do

you think its important for
people to see this stuff? This
living part of the Internet?
Its important because were moving into
an information era from the industrial era.
This is the infrastructure we are relying on.
In the industrial era, we relied on electricity
and actual highways to make and move
products. Were making things on the Internet
and transporting them on the Internet. Were
at a disadvantage if we dont know what
that looks like because its physical, and
were building our entire next era on this.
Our lives, our economy, everything is built on
thisthe future of cities are going to be built
around where the best broadband is. There
are a lot of implications. If we know what
this stuff looks like, then we can actually
speak about it and think about it. Its not
actually very complicated or difficult. Were
visual thinkers. And we can speak about
things when we have a visual concept.

One womans fantastic quest

to photograph the living internet
by CHRIS GAYOMALI

We tend to think of the Internet as vast and

infinite, an amorphous nebula of tweets,
cats, and words spilled on Flappy Bird.
And to an extent, were rightaccording
to some estimates, 90% of the worlds data
was generated in just the last two years
alone. Yet the Internet and its crushing
presence is very much finite, in as much as
the space and infrastructure required to
contain it is, physically speaking, limited
in form. Reddits server rooms take up
space. And so does your computer.
Which is why in many ways, this Internetthe
physical Internetis even more mysterious
to us than the more-familiar information
universe housed inside it. One ambitious
photographer would like to change that.
Invisible Networks is the ongoing project
of Shuli Hallak, whose end goal is to
showcase the palpable parts of the net we
otherwise never think about. Andperhaps
unsurprisinglyits pretty damn fascinating.
After getting her MFA at the School of
Visual Arts in 2005, Hallaks journey as a
photographer led her to do an artist series on
cargo ships. It was there the seed for Invisible
Networks was planted. I photographed the
whole world of cargo shipping for like two years
and got access to a port. I was really fascinated
with how ships come in and how containers
come off the ships, she told Fast Company.
There was this whole invisible network of
infrastructure we dont see. I sat down with
Hallak over coffee on a slushy day in February
to talk about her goals, the creative process,
and the Internet most of us are unfamiliar
with. The following is an edited transcript.

Gayomali: So a cargo
ship, huh? What were the
accommodations like?

How do you even go about

photographing the Internet?
Where did you start?

Shuli Hallak: Not too bad! It was like a Best

Western. It was crazy. And a lot of fun.

I made contacts and told people what I

was doing, and found a few who were
interested. Some of these telecoms and
people building infrastructure really want
to get their stuff seen and heard in the right
way. I built the right relationships, I think,
because I was in it for the long haul.

So Im guessing that living

on a cargo ship is not where
you came up with the idea to
photograph the Internet.
No, no. Its been a long, organic evolution.
After cargo ships, I became fascinated with
all the invisible stuff that makes our world
run that we dont see, like energy. Coal, oil,
renewable resourcesstuff like that. In the
back of my mind, I was always thinking about
The Matrix, you know? [Laughs] The world
we really live in and the whole illusion thing.
Then, about two years ago, I was reading
about how data centers consume all this
energyalmost as much as small cities. And
Im like, Well, thats crazy. Facebook is
building these huge server farms on the Arctic
Circle. And theyre huge. Theyre enormous.
And all it is really is our photos, the stuff we
do every day. Were building a whole other
layera whole new worldon top of our
existing world. And we dont even see it.
It just made me really curious. At first, [I
just wanted to photograph] data centers
because I think thats all I had a visual
concept of. It just points to the fact that we
think of the Internet in the abstract. Or in
the cloud. And its absolutely not. Its very,
very physical. Its graspable. And its why
I started Invisible Networks last March.

So the telecoms were receptive to

you taking pictures of their work?
Yeah. I met this guy named Hunter
Newby, who helped me out a lot. He
was one of the people who started Telx.
He told me about 325 Hudson, which is
this huge carrier hotel here in New York
that I photographed for my e-book.
Whats a carrier hotel?
Its this neural point in the network where
these core networks come together and start
connecting. A core network is a network
that carries high bandwidth. Facebook is
a core network. Sony is a core network
because of all the gamers. There are a bunch
of other ones that we havent heard of.
So, they bring their equipment to a carrier
hotel and set it up inside whats called a
meet me room. They run a fiber through
a meet me area and then, if they want to
connect to another network, that network
brings another fiber into the meet me
area, too. Its so theyre not dealing
directly to another companys equipment.

Lets talk about your creative

process. How do you go about
composing photos when you
get to a site? Do you already
have a story in mind?
Sometimes I really have no idea what Im
going to see. For some of the stuff, Im really
happy that this is a long-term thing because
I get to grow with it. Its not a one-off thing,
so theres no pressure. I try to just not think,
because I think when I think. And it ruins it.
As a photographer, I realized that all your
work is done way before you ever get
there. Youve already done your work as
an artist by beating yourself up and by
taking in all the visual stimulus and punching
it through. Its just there. Its an impulse, I
think. If you really love what you do, you
dont think about it. Im just paying attention
to whats happening. I try to get into it.
Have you ever gotten to a
site and thought, Whoa I
wasnt expecting that?
I photographed these companies pulling
fiber through the streets of New York, like
Stealth and OCG Fiber. They opened
up the manholes and I actually went
down into one. It was a mess. [Laughs]
You went down into the sewer?
Yup. Thats our critical infrastructure. Its
a mess. Its a total disaster. Its not the
companies faultstheyre just doing
whatever they have to do. Its just layers
and layers of a person or company pulling

whatever it is they need to pull. Its actually

pretty cool because its a history of New
York down thereelectric, telecom,
whatever. You look down and you dont think
its so bad. But then you go in! Apparently,
the one I saw wasnt even that bad.
So where do underwater cables
come into the picture? Do you
plan on diving or anything
to photograph them?
The funny thing is it doesnt even really
require diving. [The cables] do go on
the water, and there is an element to it
that requires a submarine rover. But the
process is really about the physical part
of it: The cables that get manufactured
and then loaded up onto these huge
ships. It takes like three weeks to load
these giant cables onto the actual ship.
And then the ship goes out to sea for like
a month. Its a beautiful processkind
of an art form. Theres over a half million
miles of submarine cables all around the
world that are tying all of us together and
sending us our information. Im excited to
see it. Its going to be really beautiful.
Are these cables really
attacked? Like that one in
Egypt a few years back?
They have cable cuts all the time,
but it isnt that big a deal. When the
cables come close to shore they are
usually buried. But anchors and fishing
ships sometimes cut them. From what I
understand, it happens quite often.

What do you mean?

When we dont have a visual concept,
were grasping for how to speak about it.
We dont know what a fiber cable looks
like. We can imagine it, because we kind
of know what cables look like. But when
were talking about fiber optics, were just
drawing up blanks. Like, what the hells
a router? Whats a carrier hotel? These
kinds of things are important. Words are
meaningless without an actual symbol.
Images provided by Shuli Hallak

26

27

Uncommon Lessons

20 THINGS
IVE LEARNED
An SEO CEO shares tips on living a
purposeful, prosperous, and happier life.
by DEV BASU

7
1 Never accept anyone

else telling you what you

can or cannot do.
No one can decide what youre capable
of except you. Dont let anyone choose
which lines you want to color in.

2 Focus on possibilities
instead of problems.

Problems are often opportunities in disguise.

3 If you dont go after what

you want, youll never have it.

The biggest enemy of progress is using the
phrase someday. Successful people dont
wait for opportunitiesthey create them.

4 Create more

than you consume.

We spend our lives in front of screens of various
shapes and sizes. In a garbage-in garbage-out
world, share your wisdom by creating a wealth
of knowledge rather than only consuming it.

5 The world doesnt

owe you anything.

Your work will go unappreciated. Your

partner will take you for granted. Your boss
will take credit for your work. Remember
that the world owes you nothing and
that your future is in your own hands.

6 Good actions count

more than good intentions.

What you do matters more than what you
intended. No one can read your mind
and no one owes it to you to really try.

At age 26 Dev Basu, CEO of

@poweredbysearch shares a few things
hes learned over the years about living
a prosperous and purposeful life.

Be kind to your body

and your soul.
Every 10 years, one can look back a
decade and feel markedly different about
their physical fitness, levels of energy, and
drive. As we age it is important to take care
of your mind and body.

Expect nothing in
return for the things
you do for others.

13

You dont need to believe in karma

to do good things for others. Be
selfless in helping others and do
not do it for any other reason but
brighten someone elses day.

Strive for
happiness
and nothing
but happiness.

Strive to be happy and content. Focus on

maximizing your happiness over everything
else: status, money, power, ego, etc.

10

Spend a few
moments with
yourself alone,
every day.

Failure is a reflection
of an event, not a person.
When you fail learn from the experience.
Life is full of chances (whether you create
opportunities or chance upon them) and
learning from your failures will help you
shape into a better person.

11

Money is a great enabler and can open

many doors but having money is not the
same as being wealthy. True wealth comes
from the sense of freedom and contentment
that is not easily displaced or replicated.

12

Learn
something
new every day.
Spend your downtime
learning new things that
can enrich your life. I
learned how to pitch
better on my daily drive
into work by listening to
audio books back when
i was around 19-21.

Break big projects

into tiny blocks.

When I was starting my undergraduate and working i remember

it being difficult to complete exercises and create scope of work
proposals at the same time. I learned to chunk projects. In its
most rudimentary form Id chart out any given project into an
outline and then work on sections one-by-one.

16

Take a couple of minutes

every day to be at peace
with yourself. If youre into
meditation then take 10
minutes to do that. If you arent,
spend the time grounding yourself
by appreciating what you have
today and preparing for the dreams
you want to pursue tomorrow.

14

You arent truly wealthy

until you have something
money cant buy.

15

When thinking about your lifes work you

dont have to settle for whats proven.
What is most important is to pick a
passion that youll likely never get bored
of and then be the best at it. Success
and money will come in spades if its
something that others care about.

Choose your partner

carefully. They can
make your life 100x
better or worse.
I couldnt imagine life without my
wife. She is a constant source of
joy, happiness, inspiration, and the
best friend i could ever ask for. All
relationships take time, effort, and
understanding but having the right
partner can make life 100x better.

18
19

Pick the
something you
love and be
amongst the best
in the world at it.

17

Let go of your
anger and jealousy.

Seriously. It isnt worth it and the only

person youre holding back is yourself.
A good life is when you assume nothing,
do more, need less, smile often, dream big,
laugh a lot, love with complete abandon,
and count your blessings every single day.

Look for work-life fit,

not work-life balance.
Your boss and colleagues count on you to pull
long-hours and you may be dissatisfied with
your job. Most people arent actually motivated
by money to switch jobs but instead look for
work-life balance. It doesnt really exist. Worklife fit focuses on employees flexibility in their
working hours, allowing them to balance work
along side personal goals or duties.

Learn to listen twice as much as you talk.

Everyone wants to be heard. It pays to listen to anyone you
speak to and understand what they are saying instead of
thinking of your next response while theyre talking. This way
we speak with each other instead of at each other.

20

Always be hungry and fight complacency.

Never get too comfortable in life. Seek new challenges regularly.
Work with your boss to help set goals for you that you can
work toward if you arent allowed to set them yourself.

Uncommon Sense was

designed in the Fall of 2014
at the Milwaukee Institute of
Art & Design by EMILY EBERT.