Transform or Die

We are still acting as if things haven't changed.

“As the philosopher Antonio Gramsci said: ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.’” This was about two minutes into a TED talk which had to do with how you could see the world through both a pessimistic lens (climate, democratic decay) as well as an optimistic lens (medical breakthroughs, diminished deforestation in the Amazon), and how both are lenses are “true,” so you should believe in neither of them but, instead, in human empowerment. (I think.)

The experience of TED is strangely intense. There is something phenomenologically powerful, not only for speakers, but for the audience, which stares down at a single solitary human being standing in the middle a giant red dot, looking as if they are being served on a dinner plate to the crowd — all inside an astonishingly beautiful Vancouver convention center, just at the edge of the water looking out on massive old-growth forests and snow dusted mountains.

The theme for this year’s TED was “Humanity Reimagined” with the framing question: “What are humans for?” I don’t remember many talks on that theme, however. Mainly I recall sessions that ranged from someone talking about AI drones, to social entrepreneurship, to trying, I think, to sell $3,500 augmented reality glasses that can help you find your car keys.

In its heyday, TED was a real force for developing culture — launching visions of the future, and catapulting figures from Brené Brown to Simon Sinek to global prominence. It has always had a largely pro-tech mood, though there was a lot of discussion this year about the great risks of AI. One can understand both why the model — cutting edge discussion of design, technology and larger ideas — was powerful in its heyday and is now feeling its age. A couple of months ago, TED’s Director Chris Andersen announced he would like to search for the next person or organization who can steward the project, presumably in part because they can feel softness in their business model.

But the strangeness of the experience had little to do with those specific dynamics of a formidable but aging institution.

I flew to Vancouver from Washington, D.C. and everything it has meant over the last months. D.C. where, at every dinner party I go to, half the people — usually with kids and middle class homes — are furloughed or fired. D.C. where two nights a week crypto tycoons are throwing lavish parties to talk about the end of tax and the rise of monarchy. D.C. where it is entirely evident to everyone that Gramsci’s new world is well on its way to being born. I came close to cancelling my trip to Vancouver in part because as a person with institutional responsibilities, I was unsure whether Trump’s latest tariffs decisions might not cause the markets to drop 3,000 points while I was in the air. As it turned out, the markets found a floor that day, but by the end of the week we ended up with 145% tariffs on Chinese goods, and they imposed 125% tariffs on ours, effectively ending trade between the two countries.

But perched above the water in Vancouver, it was difficult to remember all of this. The main stage offered one or two nods to “demagoguery,” and a few discussions of the role that tech has played in fanning political crises. There were people who would talk one to one about the pain of living in the present moment. But most speakers spent their stage time discussing robot movement, lifestyle medicine, ocean plastic reduction and product strategy at Whole Foods.

This is not to single out TED. My sense is that many institutions are working out what it means to have direction in this political moment. Think of university administrators trying to work out where to stand vis-a-vis the federal government. Or of the drama at the Washington Post about editorial priorities. Or of broadcast television trying to figure out how to fill hours of news every day. In every case we are embedded in institutional logics that were developed for a very different time and place — which nevertheless, for the moment at least, continue as if we still live in that older world.

But we do not live in 2012. To note more trivial examples, projects set up to work for “climate solutions” now can now assume that large portions of EPA will be dramatically reconfigured. Organizations that focus on public education are unsure whether there will even be a Department of Education. Institutions focused on trans-Atlanticism are unable even to assume that NATO will continue to exist. To say nothing of confronting the larger questions of our crisis of unhappiness, the future of liberalism, the balance of power.

Part of the problem might have to do with what the philosopher Timothy Morton has called “hyper objects” — items that are too large, too consequential for humans to cognize quickly (or at all). The events of this year seem to be of this kind: events at a level that are so monumental that they are hard to grasp. Though we may know that things have changed in the foundations of our society, it still feels like Thursday, and so we go on doing Thursday things.

But I tend to think that the issue is of a piece with what actually got us to this point. The institutional web that we inhabit was philosophical in its root. It was a world built after the “interregnum” Gramsci warned about. On the back of the violence of the World Wars, there were several philosophical generations. They had to confront the deep ripping of the world that had occurred, and had to make very specific decisions about what kind of world they wanted to build instead. These judgments were contingent and very possibly flawed in various cases. But they were judgments, and they yielded the entire infrastructure we depend upon.

During the deliberations for the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the scholar Charles De Visscher writes that the Second World War solidified the idea of international law on the basis of the state acknowledging “the existence of human ends which transcend it, consent[ing], out of respect for those ends, to restrict its own powers.” Convictions of this kind became structures at the highest level — from our system of international trade, to the UN, to the Hague.

But the generations that have come to live in those structures — including ourselves — so deeply accepted their premises so as to forget that they were premises — matters for argument and contestation. It isn’t obvious, for example, that free trade is good. It might be good, but that’s a contestable premise — a view about the nature of the world and of human affairs. It’s also not obvious that equality is good. It may be, but there have been philosophers as august as Plato and Dante who have argued in nuanced ways for a very different vision of human relations.

There is something about TED’s mission that feels more pressing than ever. We are desperately in need of ideas now, more than when it was founded.

I wonder if this time is going to require us to become more serious people than we have been. The debates that are being pressed upon us are deeper than anything recent generations have been adept at confronting. Do we think there are any ends that transcend the world? Do we in fact know what it is that human beings are for? Is there any answer to those who think it all reduces finally to petty scrambles of power? These are the turbulent questions into which which we are being thrown — whether we want to or not, whether we acknowledge it or not.

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This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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