Geek Heresy (34 page)

Those of us who care about social change have a similar choice to make. The long, hard road focuses on mentorship, aspirations, and intrinsic growth, which are difficult to support in a technocratic world. They’re not easy to measure. They resist quick scale-up. They’re fraught with questions of values. They don’t glisten with innovation. They violate all of the Tech Commandments.

Mentorship and intrinsic growth won’t solve all of the world’s problems. But if packaged interventions amplify human forces, then in a world already full of incredible technologies and brilliant technocratic ideas, what we need much more of is heart, mind, and will.
²⁵

Technocratic forces take care of themselves. We don’t need to push for mobile services to reach every corner of the world – telecommunication companies have already done that. We don’t need to worry about spreading profitable loans – eager banks will do so. We don’t need to spark democratic protests – frustrated citizens will rebel on their own. Packaged interventions will thrive, with or without our help, because the easily replicable parts have built-in rewards.

What doesn’t thrive on its own is quality education for all; the returns arrive after long delay and are hard to measure. Or economic on-ramps for hopeful strivers; there’s no dollar value on aspiration. Or
stronger communities and organizations; they require expensive person-to-person interaction. Or compassion among the rich and powerful; they can get along without it. In other words, we should focus on those goals for which technology and technocracy are ill suited: serving poor communities, educating the less educated, reforming dysfunctional institutions, organizing marginalized groups, preparing for long-term crises, encouraging self-transcendence, and eliciting responsiveness from those with power.

There are ready incentives for technocratic goals. What’s left to be done is by nature difficult.
²⁶
So, for anyone wanting balanced progress, for anyone with self-transcendent motivations, for anyone genuinely seeking social change, the most meaningful efforts are those not boosted by technocratic values. Packaged interventions are relatively easy. Nurturing individual and collective heart, mind, and will is hard. What we need is more people taking the long, hard road.

Conclusion

W
hen I was fifteen years old, I won the egg-drop contest at my high school, the American School in Japan. The goal was to design the smallest, lightest contraption that would protect an egg in a fall from the school’s water tower. My device nested the egg in a cardboard tube attached to a tissue-paper parachute. It would, I hoped, be my first taste of geek stardom.

My physics teacher, Mr. O’Leary, offered a hearty congratulations, and my classmates teased me out of envy. What I remember most, though, was that my victory went unmentioned in the next morning’s public announcements. Our principal regularly played up sports team triumphs and drama club events, so why didn’t a feat of engineering merit acknowledgment? It stung.

That night I thought about why I cared, and the sting gave way to curiosity. I had enjoyed designing the parachute and testing it off my eighth-floor balcony. My egg survived, and I could take pride in that. My self-image as a science whiz was preserved. So what did it matter if others knew? It seemed silly and vain to want more recognition.

I still think of that day as the dawn of my adulthood because I realized then that I was driven by powerful subconscious aspirations:
I sought certain kinds of achievement, and I wanted accolades. And while I knew at some level that it was better not to care about public esteem, the aspiration ran deep – I couldn’t reason myself out of it.

The Life You Can Save

The philosopher Peter Singer opens his book
The Life You Can Save
with one of his favorite thought experiments.
¹
Imagine you’re on your way to work when you spot a young child drowning in a pond, but no one is around to save her except for you. Rescuing the child would require you to wade into the water, ruining your new shoes and making you late for work. What do you do? Of course, you would save the child. Weighed against her life, time and cost are nothing.

Singer then asks us to consider a real situation. Every day, thousands of children around the world die of various causes. Many of the deaths could be easily prevented for the price of new shoes. Measles, for example, kills about three hundred people per day, most under the age of five, yet the American Red Cross says that every dollar you donate is enough to vaccinate one child.
²
Most of us could easily afford a dollar a day by cutting back on coffee or choosing a cheaper mobile plan. Some of us could absorb the cost with no change in lifestyle. So why aren’t we saving these dying children?

By juxtaposing the two situations, Singer argues that it’s indefensible that we allow such tragedies. His point is compelling. Innovations for Poverty Action, a nonprofit that Singer endorses, recently received a donation accompanied by a note revealing the inner tension. It read, “Damn you, Peter Singer!” But for every such donor, there are hundreds, if not thousands, who follow the thought experiment and never write a check. When I read about Singer’s drowning girl, my first thought was that I already made annual donations to several causes. Though I agreed with his reasoning, and though I could surely afford to give more, I didn’t reach for my wallet. Why was that?

A slightly different hypothetical gets us closer to the truth: Imagine that you saved one child from drowning a couple of days ago. You promptly bought a new pair of shoes to replace your waterlogged
loafers. Then, yesterday, you saw two children in the pond. You saved them both. More shoes. This morning, by some freakish coincidence, there were three drowning children. You saved all of them, too. But that’s a lot of shoes to ruin in a week, and you’ve been late for work three days in a row. You’re worried about tomorrow and the day after. What if, every day, more children needed saving? You doubt you can keep it up.

This is much more like the situation we actually face. Singer cites 27,000 children dying of preventable illness every day, or about 10 million a year. Most of us will happily save one child for a few bucks, but few of us will save all the children we possibly can on an ongoing basis. That would mean a commitment of time and money we’re not ready to make. I’m quite happy to give up 0.1 percent of my annual income, or 1 percent, or 10 percent, or maybe even 20 percent. But 50 percent, 75 percent, or 90 percent?

In other words, the abstract good conflicts with my selfish desires. I give less than I could, consume more than I need, and spend time on activities such as writing this book – which, as much as I hope it serves a positive purpose, is also a bid for self-serving esteem. Even if I put aside guilt, shame, and every other self-admonition, the stark fact is that I’m no saint. I’m unable to be as kind as I know I should be. And that’s the crux. Knowing isn’t enough – I also have to become someone who can better execute what he knows.

Technocrats extol technology and knowledge and intelligence, but positive social change requires a lot more. Millions of people in the world today live satisfying lives envied by the rest. That means that we already have the knowledge we need for well-being. As foreign-aid critic William Easterly wrote, the technocratic illusion is to think that we suffer from a “shortage of expertise.”
³
What we have instead is either a shortage of caring or a shortage of capable follow-through. Discernment is just the beginning. We also need superior intention and greater self-control. The question that Singer’s drowning child poses is less about whether to save a child, or even which packaged interventions would save the most children, than about how we become the kind of people who can, and will, save more children.

This book’s core thesis – that we should see social situations less as problems to be solved and more as people and institutions to be nurtured – has been raised by many others in different contexts. To various degrees, it aligns with Aristotle and Confucius and their intellectual descendants,
⁴
with advocates for health systems in public health, with the social worker’s idea of social development, with Easterly’s problem-solving systems in international development, with Evgeny Morozov’s polemic against technological solutionism, with Diane Ravitch and David L. Kirp’s critique of quick-fix approaches to American education, with 1980s communitarianism and its interweaving of public and private values, with the “institutional turn” in a range of social sciences, and with the thinking behind any number of feet-on-the-ground organizations that work primarily to foster people, organizations, communities, and nations.
⁵
I hope to have persuaded you that they’re all united by a single theme. The lessons of one domain apply to the others. The difficulty of eradicating polio despite potent vaccines is congruent with the challenge of providing high-quality education in a world of digital devices, which is congruent with the obstinacy of prejudice in the face of civil rights laws, which is congruent with the obstacles to democracy despite elections, which is congruent with inaction on climate change in spite of green technologies. In the twenty-first century, we have plenty of packaged interventions. What we need more of are the right kinds of heart, mind, and will.

Grow Thyself

James Madison said, “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”
⁶
Another American president, Abraham Lincoln, put it this way: “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”
⁷
What both men were gesturing at is that our own intrinsic growth is essential. In fact, it’s the most meaningful, sustainable, scalable, and cost-effective investment we can make.

We have much more control over ourselves than we do over others (however little it may feel at times), so it’s a natural place to start.
⁸
And
as we have seen, the societal effects of one person pursuing their aspirations can be significant. Patrick Awuah is just one man, but his growth ushered in new lives for hundreds of people, including Isaac Tuggun and Regina Agyare. And each of them is now spreading that impact to others. Some of us have influence on the lives of ten people, others on a thousand people, and still others on millions of people. Our intrinsic growth is vital because its impact is multiplied by the scale of our influence. The history of social activism is full of tales of bad intentions, poor discernment, and inadequate self-control among leaders causing nasty consequences downstream.
⁹
The closer we are to being the best versions of ourselves, the better the outcome for everyone we touch.

That holds among nations, too. When I lived in Bangalore, I was surprised by the degree of ecological awareness I saw among India’s middle and upper classes. Companies advertised green products. Protesters marched against cutting trees to widen roads. Some of my friends started waste separation schemes in their neighborhoods. Compared with the time lines of most developed nations, India’s environmental efforts have taken root early.
¹⁰
On a per-person basis, the country’s economy is more than half a century behind that of the United States, but its green aspirations are similar. That’s not to say that India is a haven – half of the world’s twenty worst cities ranked by air pollution are in India – but some part of the country is planning for future environmental well-being.
¹¹

Many factors have contributed to this trend, ranging from India’s own traditions of sustainability to the pressures of industrialization. But there’s another factor to consider: As members of India’s diaspora return, they bring sensibilities they learned elsewhere, including those supportive of ecological activism. India often looks to the West for cues, and it is not alone in this respect. Much of the developing world sees the materially developed one as a role model.

But if the developed world is to be a good model, its continuing intrinsic growth is paramount. There is work to do. The United States, for example, could be a much better leader in efforts to curb climate change. It’s hard to fathom how Uncle Sam can keep a straight face while pressing countries such as China and India to reduce carbon
emissions.
¹²
China and India have curtly rebuffed most such requests, and with due cause.
¹³
On a per capita basis, Americans are among the world’s worst carbon emitters, at 18 metric tons of CO
₂
per person per year, compared with China’s 6.3 and India’s 1.4.
¹⁴
It’s laudable that China and India have begun to embrace environmental issues on their own, but America has to gain a much higher moral plateau before it can ask others to curb consumption. We should lead by example, whether it’s to address climate change, global poverty, ethnic strife, or other global challenges.