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Morning Lecture Recaps

In words, song, Rhiannon Giddens reexamines American musical history through lens of banjo

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Grammy Award-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens digs into American music and its entanglement with all of America’s history. One can’t talk about the banjo, one of her historical and also musical loves, she said, without talking about slavery.

Giddens presented to her audience a slave advertisement posted in Ulster County, New York, in 1797 that truly affected her. The advertisement listed a “negro wench” for sale, about 22 years old, and read: 

“She has a child about 9 months old, which will be at the purchaser’s option.”

“So people ask me, how do I deal with this stuff?” Giddens said. “This is what I see. I write songs.” 

Giddens then played her song “At the Purchaser’s Option,” off her 2017 album Freedom Highway. Her voice flooded the Amphitheater: 

“You can take my body, you can take my bones, you can take my blood, but not my soul.” 

Giddens’ lecture was titled “The Banjo is from Appalachia: How the Creation of Musical Myths Damages Our Perception of Our True Past.” She opened Week Nine, themed “A Vibrant Tapestry: Exploring Creativity, Cultures and Faith with Smithsonian Folklife Festival,” at 10:45 a.m. Monday, Aug. 22 in the Amp.

Drawing on the work of historians and scholars who interrogate what it means to be an American, Giddens transforms that complex history into her folk music. She is interested in unearthing the forgotten, the erased, the misunderstood in U.S. history in order to contribute to a richer and fuller portrait.

“What I’ve discovered is that American music, particularly the banjo and all of its connective tissues, has been a really beautiful way to show some of the underlying issues and themes that have been mischaracterized over the last few centuries,” Giddens said.

Giddens gave an overview of the banjo in the popular cultural imagination — bluegrass, hillbillies, Steve Martin using the instrument for comedy, the damage done by “Deliverance.” These cultural phenomena have cemented the banjo in the collective American conception as a white instrument, but it originated in Africa. The akonting, a pre-banjo instrument, was the folk lute of the Jola people in West African nations such as Senegal and Gambia. Giddens shared a photo of herself learning to play the akonting on a trip to Gambia. Enslaved people being captured and brought to the Western hemisphere, particularly the Caribbean and South America, led to the creation of the banjo, she said.

Giddens emphasized the need to resist monolithic imaginings of whiteness, of Blackness, of Africa. Africa is a vast continent, home to countless cultures and languages, and yet for the captives huddled on ships, developing a community was a matter of survival.

“What you’re trying to do is, you have to create a culture that keeps you alive,” Giddens said. “And so there’s this creolization that begins as soon as people from different parts of Africa are put together on a boat to come over to the New World. So what happens is, people try to find these points of commonality before they’ve even engaged with the European world. They’re doing it amongst themselves.”

Displaying a folk art watercolor called “The Old Plantation,” attributed to South Carolina slaveholder John Rose, Giddens noted that the painting depicted a spiritual ritual with the banjo. The music, and its incorporation into religious practices, was an essential part of the survival Giddens referred. Those religious practices transformed into other cultural elements, such as the calinda, a pan-Caribbean dance. The music and dancing attracted the attention of white people. 

“The banjo was always at the center of this,” Giddens said. “What was dangerous about this was that people started to notice that when you had Black people doing this, the white people around started going, ‘Hey, what’s that? They’re doing something that’s speaking to me there.’ And they would start to gather around, and people said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no.’ These Black festivities can be tolerated, but when whites get involved, everyone needs to be careful.”

This intermingling of white and Black people, in which folks shared experiences and might realize their commonalities, was a threat to the status quo. Calinda and the banjo were banned in some places, a practice that contributed to the erasure of the banjo’s history.

“Why don’t we know this history? Because it’s dangerous,” Giddens said. “Because the more separate we are, the less we can compare notes. Because Blackness is not a monolith, right? It’s not a monolithic experience. Neither is whiteness. It’s all made up.” 

Another aspect of erased history, which Giddens said is inseparable from the Black banjo, is the prevalence of Black fiddlers and string bands. These artists provided the music for Black and white social functions throughout America.

“You find that there’s an underlying thread of Black dance musicians that go everywhere in the United States,” Giddens said. “It’s not just the South. I can’t stress this enough.”

Giddens connected the misconceptions about Celtic music to those about Black music. Irish traditional music is part of a cultural exchange between the Emerald Isles and the rest of the United Kingdom. While the narrative of history claims that Southern fiddling is descended from Irish traditions, in fact, those practices were happening simultaneously, in different locations. Regarding the non-monolithic nature of whiteness, Giddens pointed out that the Irish Catholic immigrants who fled to the United States during the 19th-century potato famine were not considered white by Americans. She said that cultural exchange, musical and otherwise, occurred between Black and Irish populations.

Giddens also pushed back on the very concept of an ancient tradition.

“It’s all about who’s controlling the narrative, and why are they doing it,” she said. “What are they gaining out of it? Just like nationalism is always dangerous, because all the good stuff happens in the margins. That’s where all of our beauty comes from, is where we interact with each other. So instead of focusing on that, people focus on how we’re different in order to control people.”

White people did not play the banjo until the 1800s. They brought in their own folk traditions and influences, and blackface minstrelsy emerged. Giddens said that we have to talk about that practice, as she believes we have not fully engaged with it as a society. It was the most popular form of entertainment for decades. 

“You can’t talk about minstrelsy without talking about the music,” Giddens said. “That’s what I focus on, is the music that went into it. The music is really all of the results of this cross-cultural collaboration between all people who are coming in. This is where you really see a lot of Irish and Black people interacting on the riverways, in the cities, countless interactions by musicians meeting and creating a new musical language that is uniquely American.”

Giddens plays a replica of a minstrel banjo from 1858, and uses it to write songs about American stories. To her, it sounds like American music.

“You hear the jigs, you hear three against two, you hear all of these proto-American aspects in that music,” Giddens said. “That’s why I’ve been digging into it, because when you talk about minstrelsy, you can’t just talk about the horribleness of it. Because it was horrible. It was mockery of Black people. It was. But there’s a lot of stuff underneath that.”

Giddens referenced Eric Lott’s book Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

“There’s this idea of mockery, but there’s also this idea of admiration,” she said. “And I want to take that. It’s at the center of so many American cultural interactions, whether we know it or not.” 

The entire English-speaking world was enraptured by minstrel music, and it gave rise to classics such as “Oh! Susanna” and “Dixie.” Giddens pointed out that Black people performed blackface minstrelsy as well.

“It happened because Black people, if they wanted to entertain, had to enter into minstrelsy because that was the only way,” Giddens said. “So they learned how to use blackface minstrelsy, subvert it, get paid.”

Jewish people, who, like the Irish, have been historically excluded from whiteness, also forged connections with Black musicians. Giddens noted that in the 1920s, there was a proliferation of Jewish songwriters creating music for Black performers, specifically for the jazz and blues genres. In the musical As Thousands Cheer, Ethel Waters was the first Black woman to get equal billing with white performers on a Broadway stage. She sang “Supper Time,” a song about lynching by Jewish writer Irving Berlin. 

Other examples of songs written by Jewish artists for Black artists include “Strange Fruit,” which was drawn from a poem by Abel Meeropol and sung by Billie Holiday, and “Hound Dog,” written for Big Mama Thornton by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Giddens said Black music and Jewish music are interwoven in the DNA of American music, and that the persecution that those groups faced created a shared understanding. Waters also famously sang the Jewish song “Eli, Eli.”

“(Waters) said, ‘It moved me deeply and I always love to sing it. It tells the tragic history of the Jews as much as one song can. And that history of their age-old grief and despair is so similar to that of my own people that I felt I was telling the story of my own race, too,’ ” Giddens said.

Yet like every aspect of historical and cultural conversation, the kinship between Jewish and Black creatives was complicated. Power differentials existed between Jewish managers and producers and Black performers.

“But there was an honest, honest cultural exchange and admiration and connection that I don’t think we talk about nearly enough,” Giddens said. “Because it is at the heart also of what’s going on with the creation of some of our most American genres like blues and jazz.”

The birth of the recording industry was a significant instance of the erasure of musical history. American musical genres were created with an oversimplified understanding of consumers in order to sell record players and albums. Despite the public’s expansive tastes, executives like Ralph Peers, who famously bragged about coining “hillbilly records” and “race records,” were invested in putting music in boxes in the name of profit.

Figures like Henry Ford, whose racist and anti-Semitic views led him to decry jazz and blues as “jungle music,” and British musicologist Cecil Sharp, who hated Black people and specifically sought out white folk artists to record, contributed to the mythology of American music. What people in positions of power chose to record is what is remembered. 

“This is how we see how folk music has been influenced by people’s blinders and blinkers and racist thoughts,” Giddens said. “Each one of these is really a topic on its own, but it’s just to give an idea of the stuff that has yet to be talked about when we talk about American music.” 

The power of media representations is undeniable. Giddens, who formed the band Our Native Daughters, with three other Black female banjo players, said that people of color have told her she inspired them to play the banjo. They previously thought the instrument wasn’t for them.

“We can’t talk about the whole history of the country without talking about all of these aspects and realizing that it’s actually much more complicated than we think, and that’s actually where the beauty is,” Giddens said.

Maria Ressa pleads for courage in fight against misinformation, saving democracy

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Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Maria Ressa closed the Chautauqua Lecture Series portion of the Week Eight theme “New Profiles of Courage” with her own courageous experience, and a call to action surrounding misinformation spread on social media. 

“This is my 36th year as a journalist and I think, like you, I learn my lessons from experience. I’m going to pull together the data, the evidence of how journalism and technology come together,” Ressa said.

She described her journalism experiences in an era of changing technology as micro, macro, and then micro again, and said that this “micro, macro, micro that I lived through actually led us to a time where the new profiles of courage are far more atomized. It is yours. It is the person next to you.”

At 10:45 a.m. Friday, Aug. 19 in the Amphitheater, Ressa, the CEO and president of the online news organization Rappler, shared how we can all find courage and how her experiences show this path toward courageousness. Ressa used her experiences in her early career as a local correspondent for CNN to show the rapid changes born from journalism and technology fusing together. 

“I became a journalist because I knew that information is power, and the kind of dystopia we live in happens when that information is corrupted, when the boundary lines between fact and fiction collapse, when the gatekeepers moved from the journalists to technology,” Ressa said. 

Prior to major social media outlets spurring global interconnectedness, Ressa could spend time in a community for days before reporting back. During her career, she witnessed this shift as she began collecting information and reporting on the same day. 

“I couldn’t spend 10 days with you. I then had to come out on satellite to talk to you …” Ressa said. “… In 2005, I decided I don’t want to write for this global community where it feels like I throw my stories into a black hole. I want to write for my community.”

In 2012, Ressa founded Rappler because she saw technology changing everything that she knew. Rappler hoped to fact-check and help limit the spread of misinformation on social media, which was becoming increasingly popular. 

Four years later, in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines and things changed for Ressa once again. 

“I got 10 arrest warrants in less than two years. I haven’t done anything wrong, except to be a journalist,” Ressa said. 

She was arrested for cyber libel. And it was made possible for her to be arrested for content published before the Philippines passed their cyber libel law.

“… I could go to jail for six years. In fact, I could go to jail for the rest of my life,” Ressa said. 

Ressa found the courage to continue her job through the weight of the retaliation against her through five lessons: learn, speak, draw the line, trust and faith. 

“Learn. With all the changes happening, oftentimes what we tend to do is to bury our heads in the sand,” Ressa said. “In fact, on social media … the voices you hear the most on social media are the extremists. But the people in the middle, the people who are the connective tissue, tend not to speak.”

Ressa’s second lesson is to speak. She described now as an essential moment; if by 2024 nothing significant happens, then enough illiberal leaders will be democratically elected to change the geopolitical power balance. 

“Speak. This is a week since Salman Rushdie was here in front of you,” she said, asking Chautauquans to remember, “the sacrifices he made to speak, the fact that I could go to jail for the rest of my life because I refuse to stop speaking. Silence is consent. Speaking doesn’t mean punch, speaking means speak. When you see something in your area of influence that is right or wrong, speak.”

Ressa thinks the third lesson, draw the line, is most critical when people are young. By drawing the line, a clear distinction is made between good and bad. 

“Draw the line. When on this side, you’re good and when you cross it, you’re evil. You have to make that clear, because the rest of our lives is about rationalizing and perhaps crossing that line,” Ressa said. “Do it when you have no vested interest in it, when you know what’s right and what’s wrong.”

The fourth lesson, trust, deeply connects social media and Ressa’s work. She believes everyone’s connected courage “will determine the fate of humanity.”

“Trust. Why is that important? Well, we’re here because we trust each other. Your community is based on trust. With trust in the room, everything is possible. Without trust, nothing is possible,” Ressa said. “The other reason why I say ‘trust’ is because that’s what social media has broken down. Social media has divided, polarized and radicalized.”

Ressa’s last lesson is faith — though she isn’t necessarily a religious person. To her, it’s more about empathy and community. 

“We have to believe in the goodness of human nature. …  One person can only do so much, but a community — … it’s a faith in someone else that they will be there for you,” Ressa said. 

Social media has put this faith in humanity in danger. Social media uses our biology against us, as thinking fast and with emotions such as anger and hate, spreads further on those platforms, Ressa said, leading to fear.

“The way you get to those five (lessons) is by embracing your fear. Whether it was walking into my third grade class in Toms River, New Jersey, where I was the shortest, and only Brown kid — I could barely speak English — to today, when I’m going around in Manila, I drive in a car with security and I have to wear a bulletproof vest,” she said.

Ressa believes there has to be a person-to-person defense of democracy, as technology and social media platforms are increasingly becoming more and more manipulative. 

“What happened? How did it change us? … What can we do about it?” Ressa said. “That’s the question: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? It’s about trust.”

Rappler has worked to rebuild trust through three pillars: technology, journalism and community. Technology in the hands of journalists is different from technology in the hands of surveillance capitalism, Ressa said. 

“In my career, what I’ve seen in Southeast Asia is that the quality of the democracy is always inevitably linked to the quality of the journalists, as from 1986 to today,” Ressa said. “Then what’s happened is the incentive structure for journalism — because we are distributed on social media — has turned everything upside down. The incentive is against good journalism.”

Surveillance capitalism, through cell phones and social media use, fosters distrust and misinformation spread. 

“There’s that digital intelligence and machine learning that’s all in your smartphone, and it creates these trends, personalized mass persuasion,” Ressa said. “Imagine if every one of you could see the feed of everyone else. You wouldn’t be seeing the same thing.”

Ressa described it as “The Matrix” meeting the “The Truman Show” times 3.2 billion. Though there are levers to somewhat control this mass communication, like money, codes, norms and laws, Ressa said, these controls cannot do much against violence. 

“Online violence is real world violence. Impunity online is impunity offline. … We’re the same person online as we are in bigger groups, our brains, our emotions, the same person. We’re affected by what happens; online doesn’t stay online,” Ressa said.

An example of online rapid radicalization leading to real-world violence in America, Ressa said, was the May Buffalo Tops Friendly Market mass shooting. Social media platforms and their algorithms have taken over as the gatekeepers of the public information ecosystem, which has left journalists with little distribution power. 

“This happened because of the traditional power of journalism, in broadcast journalism, which is where I came from, technology separated content from distribution,” Ressa said. “Let me say this. This is not a freedom of speech issue. This is a freedom of reach issue. It’s the distribution of lies.”

A lie spreads faster and further than facts, and influences the behavior modification system; this system is when someone’s behavior is indirectly influenced by something online.

“For example, in 2014 it came bottom-up, and then came top-down. … You state the lie a million times, ‘Maria Ressa is a criminal,’ and then a year later, President Duterte says the same thing: ‘Maria Ressa is a criminal, journalists are criminals,’ ” Ressa said. “A week after he said this in the State of the Nation Address, I got my first subpoena. Rappler got its first subpoena, and then we had 14 investigations in 2018, and then I kept getting arrested.”

Another reason lies spread so rapidly is due to Facebook’s “friends of friends” algorithm, which causes the things you like to repeatedly show up on your feed. This meant hyper-political polarization, specifically in the Philippines, where if you were pro-Duterte you moved farther right, and if you were anti-Duterte you moved farther left, Ressa said. 

“Antitrust, data privacy, user safety, content moderation, all of this. These things roll up. Laws need to be put in place to protect us from this,” Ressa said. 

In 2016, Ressa, with the other co-founder of Rappler, wrote a three-part series that looked into how democracy was affected by Facebook algorithms and fake accounts. They found that 26 accounts influenced more than 3 million accounts. Ressa shared how accounts latched on and actively dehumanized her, with online harassment comparing her to apes and scrotums because of how she looked. 

“When you dehumanize, you then open up to treating people like criminals or beyond that,” Ressa said. “This is dangerous.”

In 2020, UNESCO conducted a survey regarding the treatment of female journalists and found that 73% experience online abuse, 25% receive threats of physical violence and 20% are attacked in the real world. 

“I’m still not going to let it stop me. Don’t let it stop you from doing the right thing. … 60%,  almost half a million attacks, on Facebook and Twitter were meant to tear down my credibility, 40% were meant to tear down my spirit,” Ressa said. “The goal is to silence. The goal is to make people not believe. The goal is chaos. The goal is to tear down trust.”

To further exemplify rapid radicalization and spread of misinformation, Ressa spoke about Jan. 6, 2021. The earliest mention of election fraud had happened a year earlier, online, Ressa said.

“Online conspiracy theories impact the real world. It wasn’t a surprise to me, but to see how easily American institutions can collapse alarms me because where America goes, the world goes,” Ressa said. 

Ressa then circled back to her Nobel Peace Prize speech and a case study on the repeated attacks on her Twitter account. The study found that a majority of the Twitter accounts attacking her were supportive of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. and were created after his declaration to run for president. 

“We did a story to shine the light, as the only defense a journalist has is to shine the light. Otherwise, we just have to absorb the blows. We have no recourse. We just have to be strong enough to absorb the news,” Ressa said. “We did the story; Marcos tried to take over Twitter with freshly made accounts and, a few days after that, Twitter acted, and suspended over 300 accounts in Marcos’ network.”

To Ressa, the word “trust” means something different in this new age of social media. 

“If there is an information operation, do you ask the people who have been manipulated who they trust? This is a problem in every country around the world. How do we define trust? Are we defining trust because we’re measuring the impact of information warfare? Or the question here is: How much agency do you have if you live on social media?” Ressa said. 

Now Ressa is working toward rebuilding trust through technology, journalism and communities. She uses a pyramid to show how Rappler is working toward further fact-checking, meshing it with research and preparing legal action.

“Their goal is to share the fact checks on social media, with emotions,” Ressa said. “As much as anger and hate spreads fast, inspiration spreads faster.”

Through the help of outside research companies and lawyers, 21 tactical and strategic litigations were filed in about two months.

“It must be a whole society approach to restore trust. At the core of it is our faith and our commonality and our humanity. This is what we need to do,” Ressa said. “Please, I think we don’t have that much time. I’ve seen such degradation of democracy.” 

With Darren Walker, Levi Strauss & Co. CEO Chip Bergh speaks on leadership in U.S. businesses

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When Chautauqua Institution’s Department of Education and Department of Religion were first conceiving of a joint, 10-lecture platform dedicated to the theme of “New Profiles in Courage” with Ford Foundation President Darren Walker, for Walker, one name “immediately came to mind” — Chip Bergh, president and chief executive officer of Levi Strauss & Co.

In Bergh’s and Walker’s conversation Thursday, Aug. 18 in the Amphitheater, they talked about the state of corporate America, the state of the American economy, and the state of leadership in American industry.

Bergh prides himself on the fact that, for his entire professional career, he has served just three institutions: the U.S. Army, Proctor & Gamble, and now, Levi Strauss. The common thread? All three have been around for a very long time, he said, and all have a common purpose of making a difference in the world.

Founded in 1853 in San Francisco, during the midst of the Gold Rush, Levi Strauss bears the name of “the man, the legend” who invented and patented rivets for denim jeans.

“If you were a gold miner, … if you blew out your pants, you had to leave the mine and go back to San Francisco. You would lose about a month’s worth of potential income. So the rivet changed the jean forever,” Bergh said. 

Strauss made a profit in his very first year; but he wasn’t in the business to make a profit, Bergh said. So he donated a portion to a local orphanage. 

“He knew, 170 years ago, that the purpose of a company was to be more than just make money for himself and his family, and shareholders,” Bergh said. “He knew that part of the profit needs to go back into society, that business had a purpose to be good in the world. That was part of the legacy I’ve inherited.”

Walker asked how Levi Strauss’ values aligned with Bergh’s. The company, Bergh said, has a long track record of taking stands on social issues: Factories in the United States desegregated 10 years before the Civil Rights Movement; Levi Strauss was the first major American company to offer benefits to same-sex partners; in 1992, when the Boy Scouts of America introduced a policy excluding gay men and atheists from the organization, the apparel company pulled funding. More recently, Bergh said, in 2017 the company spoke out against President Donald Trump’s travel ban from majority-Muslim countries. 

“You punched above your weight because of the moral leadership of the company and at a time when consumers, when the public, desperately needs moral courageous leadership from corporate America,” Walker said. “But they do not feel that they are getting it.”

Further, Walker asked if Bergh could discuss why CEOs of public companies should be incentivized to share more revenue with employees, rather than a single handful of stakeholders.

“The big debate these days is stakeholder capitalism vs. shareholder primacy,” Bergh said. “The purpose of business is to return as much profit back to the shareholders. Shareholders are important stakeholders, but there are other stakeholders.”

Long-term thinking, Bergh said, means acknowledging that “there is a much broader stakeholder base than shareholders, with your employees probably being the single biggest stakeholder in your business.”

Sustainable businesses, like Levi Strauss, are ones that believe that the employees, and the communities in which they live and work, should be a priority.

Levi Strauss went on the public market with an IPO in 2019; in launching that offering, Bergh said he had made it clear: “ ‘If you don’t like the fact that the CEO of a company is taking a stand on ending nonviolence in this country, do not buy our stock. We are not the company for you.’ ”

“We believe that over the long-term, that doing good in the world and making a difference in our employees’ lives, in our retirees’ lives, in the communities where we live and work, that we focus on making a positive difference in the world — that that will pay dividends in the long run,” Bergh said.

Walker shifted Bergh to the idea of ESG, shorthand for “environment, social, and governance.”  

“Some companies are really trying to do the right thing, and you have other companies that are greenwashing and making claims that they cannot really back up,” Bergh said. “… With climate change, the actions that companies take or fail to take in the impact we can have in the world in that respect (can be significant).”

Environmental work is particularly important for apparel companies; Bergh said Levi Strauss has been proactive in “trying to take really meaningful and aggressive steps to make a difference there. It used to be that we used a lot of chemicals and dyes to produce some genes. We significantly reduce the amount of chemicals, the amount of dye in the amount of water.”

A new finishing process for Levi’s, Bergh said, saves billions of gallons of water a year.

Bergh noted that the company tends to get high marks on the “environment” and “social” aspects of ESG, but “dinged on the governance component because we have a dual flat structure.” The Strauss family owned the company before its IPO, and still has “a super-voting power, if you will.” But at this point, the Strauss descendants are so numerous, “the family’s interest in the company is exactly the same as what the public company interest should be, which is the long-term potential of this company.”

Thus, Bergh said, the shareholder interests are so commonly aligned that the company should be getting higher marks for it. 

But Walker pointed out that as ESG becomes more of a buzzword, there is also a growing anti-ESG movement, with a number of state treasurers directing pension managers to not invest in what they call “woke capitalism.” Bergh again pointed to the Boy Scouts, and the fallout of pulling funding in 1992.

“The company got 120,000 letters and emails over the next week saying, ‘I’m burning my Levi’s, never buying Levi’s again.’ The company was fine,” he said. “They did not walk or waiver one bit. They stood to it. So one of the examples I like to use when we make a decision on whether we are going to weigh in on something is, well, history proved us right. … You are not always going to please everybody, but it’s about — are we moving the ball ahead in a meaningful way to make this world a better place? To make a difference?”

To go back to the “social” of ESG, Bergh shared his own moment of reckoning in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd.

“One of the most important legacies I want to leave is making our company a more inclusive and more diverse company,” he said. 

The pandemic, and Floyd’s murder, threw “an incredibly bright light on the social and racial injustices that we experience in this country,” Bergh said. “The story that had been in my head was we were making so much progress as a company in breaking racism and the reality is what we discovered — I will speak for myself — is that we really haven’t.”

When he looked at the data, he was right, and he sees it as a failing.

“If you had looked at our numbers holistically in the U.S., we look pretty good, but if you strip out our retail stores and distributions center and focus on corporate headquarters, our numbers, our culture was not an inclusive and diverse culture,” he said.

The board makeup included women and Hispanic women, Bergh said,  buy there wasn’t any Black people on Levi Strauss’ board. And there’s still no Black leaders on his executive team. But he’s working on it, and Walker vouched for that to the audience.

“We are slowly making progress,” Bergh said.

Levi Strauss, Walker pointed out, does have a reputation for being a liberal, progressive company. Bergh shared strategies within the company to increase diverse hiring, particularly through a summer internship program.

“We do a lot of mid-career hiring, but not a lot of entry-level hiring. Eighty-five percent of those hires this year were BIPOC, because we were intentional about the results we wanted to get. We now have a process in place for hiring: 50% of the slate must be diverse,” Bergh said. “So we are getting different results because we have changed the structures, and we just have to stay at it.”

Walker asked what it felt like when Bergh walks into the room of the Business Roundtable, an organization of CEOs from America’s largest companies — and a big source of political campaign donations from individual members.

“I’ve got a bit of tension with the Business Roundtable,” Bergh said. “In many ways it serves a lot of good and does a lot of good work on behalf of the business community, but they often stay silent on a number of issues that I wish they wouldn’t stay silent on. … (But), at the end of the day, it’s really a lobbying institution to influence policy at the national level in particular.”

With 200 or so companies represented on the BRT, all of those CEOs are coming from different industries and different stakeholder groups. With the recent passing of the Inflation Reduction Act, Bergh said, the BRT was divided.

“They were very positive on a lot of the environmental things, but negative on, ‘How are we going to pay for it?’ … It was kind of like we want to do all the good stuff, but we don’t want the bad stuff to come along with it,” Bergh said. “I think that’s part of the dilemma.”

It’s a larger tension, Walker noted, “this notion in our culture and society that we want something, but we don’t want to pay for it.”

That notion goes beyond corporate America, Walker said, and extends to politicians and, most importantly, voters. 

“I worry that we don’t have leaders both in corporate America and, more broadly, in society who tell us the truth: that you don’t get nothing for nothing, that if you want services, you have to pay for them,” Walker said. “… We have a culture here, and many CEOs are part of this culture, that is a race to the bottom. ‘Tell me the state that will charge me the lowest taxes and I will move my headquarters there.’ ”

So, Walker asked, is it possible to imagine that this ideology can be changed?

“I think the answer is ‘yes,’ ” Bergh said, and went back to the very beginning of the company he now runs. It was started in San Francisco, is still headquartered there, and many members of the Strauss family still live there.

But the lease at the headquarters’ building is expiring at the end of 2022. And the company made a choice to stay, rather than race to the bottom.

“Two years ago we started talking, should we look at a lower cost place to do business?” Bergh said. “Even just moving across the bridge from San Francisco to Oakland would have saved us about $10 million a year just in city taxes. We decided, you know what, we are here in San Francisco as part of our legacy. … Today there is a vacuum of leadership in that many institutions and government, and companies needed to step in and build the bridge.”

With Nancy Gibbs as interviewer, Jonah Goldberg talks ‘gradual then sudden’ shifts in media, politics

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Ernest Hemingway once explained bankruptcy like this: It’s gradual for a long time, and then it’s sudden. 

This idea, of gradually into suddenly, of slowly and then all at once, was a frequent theme during Wednesday morning’s Chautauqua Lecture Series presentation in the Amphitheater with Jonah Goldberg, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the former senior editor of National Review. 

He was interviewed by Nancy Gibbs, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and former managing editor of Time. Their discussion was part of Week Eight’s joint-platform theme, “New Profiles in Courage.”

Goldberg’s conversation moved among the decay of media, to the shift of the nation’s highest office from presidency to performance, and the crumbling of institutions and parties. And it all started with Gibbs’ opening prompt: Let’s start with the news.

Tuesday evening, U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo) lost her primary by more than 30 percentage points; it was predicted, and speculation is already mounting that Cheney will launch a presidential bid.

“What I’ll often tell people is there’s a number of ‘closet normals,’ ” Goldberg said — the politicians who will say one thing when there’s no cameras around, and another thing if there is, who pretend that “somebody else would deal with Donald Trump, or … that the party hasn’t really changed.” He considered Cheney a closet normal until Jan. 6.

“I salute her bravery and courage, and we’re supposed to talk about courage these days,” he said. “I get very, very frustrated with a lot of my friends on the right who will say, ‘Look, I don’t want Republicans to compromise their principles on important things, but we also have to be practical about political reality.’ My view is that if you can’t tell the truth about Donald Trump and about what’s going on on the right, then you have compromised your principles.”

That idea, of saying one thing in public and another in private, is one of the reasons Goldberg left Fox News as a commentator in 2021. Gibbs pointed out how many moments, especially recently with the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, seemed to be the moment that would “break the pattern of people saying one thing in private and another in public,” and yet Cheney is still out there “largely by herself.” 

It goes back to Hemingway’s explanation of bankruptcy, and Goldberg pointed to the shift Trump represented from a president leading the people, to people leading the president. 

“The problem is that Donald Trump was only responsive to praise. If you criticized him, he would go the other way,” he said. “… He has this oppositional disorder, and so politicians would go on TV and only praise him, because that was the only way you could influence him, and over time, that’s all the audiences wanted to hear as well.”

As the audience goes, so goes the market; yet another part of the problem is that the market and its consumers “tend to follow politics like it’s a form of entertainment,” Goldberg said.

Politicians become heroes, and once they’re heroes, voters don’t care about policy — they care about winning. Goldberg, a conservative and a fellow at both the National Review Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, pointed to how the hero-worship of politicians extends to the Democratic Party, as well.

“(Obama) did an enormous number of things that violated principles, constitutional principles, that were troubling and problematic,” Goldberg said. “… People didn’t care. They cared about the winning.”

With politics as a form of entertainment, or even what Goldberg described as “a religious, existential struggle,” cultural ideas like the alpha male move to the forefront. Gibbs asked him to discuss the idea of a masculinity crisis in America. The definition of manhood bandied about by people like U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, Goldberg said, is “basically juvenile, puerile, self-serving. It elevates rudeness to a virtue.”

“To me, this completely inverts what conservatism is supposed to believe, what any notion of Christian virtue or just old-fashioned civic virtue is supposed to believe,” he said. “What society doesn’t need is strong men — it needs good men. And good men aren’t cruel on purpose.”

Politics, going back to Aristotle, are supposed to be about persuasion, not performance or punitiveness.

And with the increasingly incentivized structure of the media landscape that, by definition, turns not just politicians, but pundits like Goldberg himself, into entertainers, the narrative becomes more important than the facts.

“I think one of the things that, as a society, we have a real problem with — and a lot of it has to do with the decline of religion in society and the decline of the family and the decline of healthy local communities — is that one of the reasons why we’re turning to politics as a sort of religious, narrative form of entertainment is because we are hungering for a sense of community and meaning in this country,” Goldberg said.

Thus, partisan politics becomes a form of secular religion.

“That’s what’s happening: We are taking partisan identities and coming to the mistaken conclusion that we can fill the holes in our souls with it, and we can’t,” he said. “That makes us angry and that makes us fight and cling to the stuff even harder.”

Both parties are guilty of it, and it ties back to the shift from politician to performer, to the need for a narrative of winning, and to the religious zeal people place, Goldberg said, on “presidents like they are God-kings.”

Gibbs noted that along with that, America is also seeing an “enormous rise in really negative attitudes towards the other side. And in fact, that the parties are mainly defining themselves by their opposition to the other.” 

Goldberg equates it to his favorite The New Yorker cartoon, of two dogs in a fancy bar, wearing fancy suits. One says to the other: “You know, it’s not good enough that dogs succeed. Cats must also fail.”

“Both parties are basically the ‘Cats Must Also Fail Party.’ They care more about the other side losing than their own side winning,” Goldberg said. “… This is part of the gradual and sudden problem.”

Institutions like mainstream media, amplified by the steroids of social media, have eroded trust. Other elite institutions have, as well, Goldberg said — and it’s again because those platforms are used for performance. Institutions, like the Marines or the Boy Scouts, are supposed to mold character, he said.

“We live in a time where people have no respect for the role of the institution or their role within the institution, and instead they use it as a platform for their own cult of personality, their own celebrity,” Goldberg said.

Colin Kaepernick may have been right, Goldberg said, about the issues of police brutality, but he used the NFL as a platform for his issues. Journalists do it, too, and Trump “used the presidency as an institution for his own personal needs … his own celebrity.”

The 2009 rise of the Tea Party saw “a kind of psychic break,” and the idea among voters that “ ‘if they’re going to call us deplorables, we might as well act like it,’ ” Goldberg said. 

Any sort of confidence in or presumption of good faith from the other side was lost, Goldberg said. If good character is defined in partisan terms, by definition, he said, no one knows what good character is anymore.

Gibbs turned the conversation to the academic debate on basic structural voting reform — Goldberg outlined the merits of a jungle general primary, but said that personally, he’d get rid of primaries entirely. In an era of significant polarization, the old patterns and habits don’t work anymore.

Weak parties create strong partisanship, he said, so both Democrats and Republicans have work to do. He described the idea of getting rid of the Electoral College as a “red herring” and a “siren song.”

Gibbs closed her interview by asking Goldberg to expand on something he recently wrote: that people on the left are waiting for a “mass atonement” from the Republican Party, by virtue of the right moving past Trump. Goldberg thinks that’s unrealistic, and not how America will move forward.

“Ronald Reagan didn’t go around beating the stuffing out of Richard Nixon and Watergate, but just moved on,” he said. “I think that the way the Republican Party moves on is by moving on. … The way the party moves on is by simply saying, ‘it’s time for somebody new.’ ”

Goldberg does hope that the party moves on, that “the fever goes away,” because he cares more about “the transformation of rank-and-file Republicans … normal, decent American citizens, many of whom now, I think, are enthralled or brainwashed by a crazy narrative about what’s going on with America.”

That narrative, Goldberg said, makes it normal to say that the FBI is the Gestapo, or normal to say that “we need a civil war,” and makes space in the Republican Party for politicians to dabble in Holocaust denial — space for the “views of people who have really, in some cases, truly evil positions.”

Too many of those who carry such views have started to gain power and control in various states, Goldberg said, and once more drawing on the idea of “gradual, then sudden,” he recalled a scene from “The Simpsons.” 

“Twenty years in the future, Marge and Homer are watching Fox … in bed as an old couple,” Goldberg described. “And Marge just turns to Homer and says, ‘Homey, it’s just amazing. Fox’s transformation into a 24-hour porn channel was so gradual, I hardly even noticed.’ ”

When Goldberg turns on the television, he sees political porn that’s “going to have a half-life, that is going to take a while to work itself out of the system.”

While the Democratic Party has lost its rationale for coalition, Goldberg said, that’s not the same as the  moral problems that exist within the GOP. He could see one of these two parties dying, and returned to the idea of The New Yorker cartoon.

“The ‘Cats Must Fail’ thing kicks in,” he said. “In an era of negative polarization, if the reason for one party to exist is because they hate the other party so much, when one party dies, the other party loses its reason to live. I can see us having a major scrambling of the nature (of the two parties in) what they stand for. What they are could be very different in 10 years’ time. And that would probably be a good thing.”

With Darren Walker, Misty Copeland shares how she found strength through dance, historic journey to ABT

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When someone looks at Misty Copeland, they see the first Black female Principal Dancer for the American Ballet Theatre, a mentor to young dancers, and the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Life in Motion.

But what did it take for her to get there?

That is what Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, wanted to find out in his conversation with Copeland at the 10:45 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 16 installment of Week Eight’s Chautauqua Lecture Series in the Amphitheater.

For Copeland, her journey started in Kansas City, Missouri, before her, her three siblings and her mother moved to Southern California. Frequently homeless, Copeland and her family stayed in motels or with friends who had extra space.

“Because of that, I didn’t feel that I had a voice,” Copeland said. “I didn’t feel that anyone needed or wanted to hear from me, or the things I was thinking about or cared about.”

One thing showed her that her voice mattered and helped her communicate what was going on inside of her, and that was dance.

“It wasn’t until I discovered dance and ballet that I felt that I was good at something, that I actually had a way of expressing what was inside of me,” she said.

While dance felt right to Copeland, it was not always an easy journey. Her mother inspired her to continue to stay strong through hardship.

“To see her raising six children on her own, it instilled in me this is what a strong Black woman is,” she said. “I think that’s what I have always striven to be.”

After hearing about the hope and inspiration of Copeland’s life, Walker had to ask about the grief.

“No child who is technically homeless, moving from motels to sleeping on the sofas and floors of friends’ homes, can come out of that experience without having to deal with real pain,” he said.

Copeland acknowledged he was right. As she grew up, she noticed how the trauma of not having a stable home affected her; those feelings and that hurt would pop up without warning. She deals with pain through dance, and does not think that her background should limit her.

“You should not be boxed into this place where — just because of the circumstances you grew up in — that should dictate what your future looks like,” she said. “That has been my journey, believing in that. And knowing that, with the right support, that you can overcome anything.”

Walker expressed his surprise that she overcame so much pain through a career in one of the “most elitist, whitest” art forms. No stranger to the dance world, Walker has served on boards for prestigious dance companies, such as the New York City Ballet.

“There is no art form that is seemingly more unwelcoming of Black women than classical dance,” he said.

Whether it is critiquing the shape of their body, or encouraging them to switch into other forms of dance, classical dance is a difficult space for women of color. But when Copeland first experienced dance as a 13-year-old at the Boys & Girls Club of San Pedro, California, she didn’t immediately feel that. She did not know ballet’s discriminatory history at the time; she just knew she loved to dance.

“The technique, the pure language of this craft is not racist. It’s not. It doesn’t exclude,” she said. “It’s the most beautiful, pure way of communicating that I had ever connected with.”

Part of what made her initial encounter with dance so magical was her teacher.

“I had a teacher who supported and encouraged me and made me feel beautiful, and celebrated my Blackness,” she said. “It was never something that we were hiding. It was never a conversation that was avoided, and I felt like all of that gave me a really pure and natural introduction into classical dance.”

Walker used this moment to encourage the audience members to create scholarships for dancers. Donating money allows for dancers to learn and grace performance stages that they couldn’t have without financial support, he said.

The next step in Copeland’s career was her move to New York City, where she joined the American Ballet Theatre. It felt like a completely different world to her.

“I think, ‘I’m moving to New York City. There’s so many cultures and people from different backgrounds.’ And I was really excited to come into this atmosphere,” she said. “Then I was spending eight hours a day in a building where I only saw white people and I only interacted with white people. I was the only Black woman in the American Ballet Theatre for the first decade of my career.”

Her dance teacher in San Pedro encouraged her to join ABT because it is technically culturally diverse as it accepts dancers from anywhere, whereas other ballet companies only accept dancers from their own schools. Even with this practice, ABT’s company was still very white.

The language toward Copeland shifted when she came to ABT. In San Pedro, her teachers told her she was a prodigy and she was built perfectly for dance. But in New York?

“You are too short. Your breasts are too big. You shouldn’t be cast in the ballet blanc, which translates to white ballets — I would ruin the line,” she said. “I would take away from this sea of white dancers on the stage dressed in while tulle and pink tights and pointe shoes.”

This did not sit well with Copeland. She discussed it with her Black dance peers in New York. It came down to a lot of tough and uncomfortable conversations that Copeland had to have with the artistic staff.

Walker noted how a lot of Black dancers left the industry because these conversations are so difficult to have.

“Most just ultimately could not withstand the racism, the sexism,” he said. “So what gave you the courage? Where did you muster the confidence when you are being told things that actually undermine your confidence?”

Copeland points to her support system.

“(They were) powerful Black women who wanted to be an example and help raise me up. But it’s also been generations and generations of other Black dancers chipping away,” she said. “I think that the timing of me coming into ABT was a big part of it. This is not just my courage.”

Dylan Townsend / staff photographer Copeland and Walker’s conversation was part of the 10-lecture platform dedicated to the theme of “New Profiles in Courage.”

While many Black dancers have come before Copeland, she is the first Black Principal Dancer at ABT, a historic position. Because of this, Walker thinks she is part of the larger history of the company, and of ballet itself.

Copeland accepts this, but said she is hardly the only Black ballerina.

“My responsibility is uncovering, telling these stories that have been erased, that haven’t been documented. Yes, I’m the first African American Principal Ballerina with American Ballet Theatre,” she said. “But there have been Black ballerinas contributing to classical dance for so many generations.”

Without mentors like Raven Wilkinson, who was the first African American ballerina to dance for a major ballet company, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Copeland isn’t sure if she would have had the courage to keep showing up in predominantly white, or sometimes all-white, spaces and keep dancing.

“I stand on the shoulders of so many people who have put in the work for generations and generations and deserve to be acknowledged and shown that they’ve contributed to this history,” she said.

She is not alone as a Black dancer, but sometimes she feels the added pressure of being one. When she thinks only about performing the movements of classical dance, she does not feel frightened. The fear comes when she considers being a Black ballet dancer.

“I would say the first time that I truly experienced fear, it was all wrapped up in years of baggage and trauma of the Black ballet experience that I carried on my shoulders when I was given the opportunity to perform Swan Lake for the first time,” she said. “The fear of, if I fail, will there be another opportunity for a Black woman to take on this role?”

She could not help but think of the Black people who would come after her, and if her performance would directly impact their opportunities.

This fear was backed up by the media response of her Swan Lake lead. For most dancers, they debut in a matinee performance, and it is not an earth-shattering experience, but for Copeland, the New York Times was previewing it. Newspapers and magazines were questioning if this opportunity would get Copeland promoted to Principal Dancer or not. All eyes were on her.

But when she got onstage, everything brewing inside her calmed.

“As soon as I stepped onto the stage, it’s like you remember the majority of the people who are in the audience are there to support you. They are there to enjoy the performance. So I had to remember that,” she said. “Once I went on stage, it was like I was enveloped in the embrace of people who wanted to be there.”

ABT now has one of the youngest and most diverse audiences out of all major American ballet companies. Walker and others contribute this to Copeland’s 2015 promotion to Principal Dancer, and he wanted to hear about what the day was like when she was promoted. As an outsider, Walker remembered seeing a Dow Jones ticker message proclaiming the news.

When Copeland was promoted, she was exhausted from a whole season of dancing at the Metropolitan Opera House. They were in a meeting the day she found out.

“My director just turned to me, and he didn’t even say, ‘You’ve been promoted to Principal Dancer.’ He said, ‘Misty, take a bow.’ Everyone knew what that meant,” she said.

Since the Metropolitan Opera House had a show that night, Copeland had to keep moving and did not have time to immediately process her promotion. She still knew she had to dance to the best of her ability, no matter what her new title was.

“My responsibility is to go on stage and put on the best show that I can, so to stay present and to stay ground ed. I think that’s the beauty of ballet,” she said. “There’s no shortcuts. There’s no way to phone it in. When you go on stage night after night, it is so technically and emotionally demanding that it humbles you night after night after night.”

While Copeland thinks about the rehearsals and the shows she has to do, she also thinks about the future of ballet, which inspired her to create the Misty Copeland Foundation. The goal of the foundation is to create diversity in the ballet by giving more opportunities for children to learn how to dance.

“Through my own experience of being given an opportunity, being given a scholarship, being discovered at a community center, I wouldn’t be the woman that I am,” she said. “It’s not about the beautiful, amazing career that I’ve had, but the tools that I have learned through dance, through being a part of a community center that gives you access to mentorship and tutors.”

In Copeland’s experience, people want to do that work of teaching students who may not otherwise have the resources to be trained. These conversations of how more people can become involved in dance, and the lack of diversity in classical dance are happening, she said. And especially after the murder of George Floyd, she said, they’re happening in major dance companies like ABT.

“I feel hopeful for the future of classical dance,” Copeland said. “And I will forever be a part of it in a major way.”

Neuroscientist Marsh opens week with fundamental biology of courage

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Abigail Marsh opened Week Eight’s theme, “New Profiles in Courage,” with the fundamentals of courage. Marsh’s lecture was the first after last Friday’s attack on Salman Rushdie and Henry Reese in the Amphitheater just prior to the 10:45 a.m. lecture.

Before Marsh gave her lecture, “The Courageous Brain,” on Monday in the Amp, Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill introduced the week’s theme. He said that Chautauqua’s summer season themes seek to answer the questions: “What are the most important and interesting conversations of our time? And what obligations do we have to humanity to propel positive action from what we learn?”

These themes take careful planning. 

“We conceive these themes sometimes well more than a year in advance of the day they come to Chautauqua stages, and this week’s theme is no exception,” Hill said. “What is also no exception is that our theme this week, given what we experienced on Friday, Aug. 12, on this very stage, seems prescient. This community proves the thesis. There’s nothing more important, more needed today in our world, than courage.”

“New Profiles in Courage” comes in collaboration with Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. Walker found the need to explore the idea of courage when he looked around the world for courageous leaders and found there was little incentive to be courageous. 

“When we look for courage, we must start as a community and you all know this, you saw this: Courage is often not exhibited by the most prominent members, the most famous members of those communities, the wealthiest, with the most status, but often from those everyday, hardcore, dedicated, determined, citizens of a community,” Walker said. “… This week is about looking across disciplines, in politics, in the arts, and in the private sector, to ask ourselves: Where might we find the courage?”

Marsh, a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at Georgetown University and the author of The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between, looks at courage through the scientific lens. In her research she uses functional and structural brain imaging — and behavioral, cognitive, genetic, and pharmacological techniques. 

“The research I’ve done has done nothing but reinforce my belief and the great capacity for goodness that the vast majority of people have — a fact that I think was only reinforced by the incredible courage that was displayed here on Friday by Mr. Rushdie and by so many of the Chautauqua staff and guests,” Marsh said. 

Marsh shared the story of Dave McCartney who, in 2006, witnessed a car accident in front of him and rose to the occasion, helping save the driver as their vehicle became engulfed in flames.

 “He took a course of action that put him in serious danger of being hurt or killed for no personal gain,” Marsh said. “That is a hard choice to explain, understand, for anyone who believes … that humans are fundamentally selfish, that all of our behavior is motivated by our own self interest.”

Abigail Marsh speaks during the morning lecture Monday morning August 15 in the Amphitheater. SEAN SMITH/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

She quoted U.S. Senator Cory Booker, whom she described as a heroic rescuer: 

“Just driving in our car, most of us have problems and challenges and the question is, are you going to be someone who just keeps going?” 

Booker’s words resonate with Marsh, as during her own car accident, she was helped by an onlooker. 

“I survived. I’m standing here today because that stranger didn’t just keep going,” Marsh said. “What I’ve been trying to understand, more or less since then, is what made that man stop? What makes any of us change course from whatever road we’re heading down to help others instead of just keeping going?”

The definition of courage is the mental strength to persevere and withstand danger, difficulty or fear. Marsh asked if courage is the ability to overcome fear, or the inability to feel fear.

“Which one of these traits really makes heroes? Are they somehow better at overcoming fear than most people? And if so, how do they do that? Or are they just not affected by fear?” Marsh said. 

Booker is a great example of this, said Marsh, and shared a story of Booker running into a burning building to save his neighbor’s daughter. People took this as ultimate fearlessness. 

“Any of us can be a hero, because fearlessness is really easy to recreate in a lab. Any reasonably capable lab tech can make any of us fearless, and maybe heroes, instantly and we know it’s based on decades of research on the origins of fear,” Marsh said. “In mammals, including humans, the origins of fear lie this treasure called the amygdala.”

In the brain, the amygdala triggers the fear response in the body and is responsible for recognizing fear in others. The amygdala causes the freeze, as well as the fight or flight responses,  to threats in a matter of milliseconds. Marsh said she felt this once as she read on a porch and a bear walked toward her. Without even realizing it, Marsh yelled and ran toward the bear while she was trying to get to safety. This response was a function of the amygdala.

“People often find themselves responding to threats without even fully realizing what they’re doing, thanks to this incredibly sophisticated network within the amygdala,” Marsh said.

Marsh showcased its functions through videos of rats, one with a functioning amygdala and one without. The rats were subjected to the threat of a predator standing between them and their food. This study showed that the rat with an amygdala showed a fear response, while the rat without an amygdala did not. 

This phenomenon can be seen in the medical case Patient SM, a woman who lost her amygdala due to a rare genetic disorder. Patient SM does not feel fear. During a study, researchers would show her a picture before mildly electrocuting her. Though the shocks hurt and she didn’t like them, she did not fear them happening.

“This sounds a little great.  Who would like to go through life like this? But as it turns out, fear is a really useful emotion. … You might not be surprised to hear that Patient SM does have a lot of challenges in her life — in part because she’s just not motivated to avoid danger,”  Marsh said. “… Her behavior fits the definition of courage according to the dictionary, but seems to be missing something. Courage is something we think of as admirable and virtuous, but as this isn’t quite that. She’s just reckless.”

Marsh sees similar behavior in people with a more common disorder, psychopathy, which is connected to a malfunctioning amygdala.

“Having worked with adolescents and adults with psychopathy for over a decade now, I can tell you they are much more likely to be anti-heroes, to put other people in danger by exploiting or attacking them, and then to act courageously to benefit other people at some cost to themselves,” Marsh said, “which is a huge problem for our hopes that the secret to courage is just eliminating fear. Natural experiments that reduce or eliminate fear do not result in heroism, but in recklessness at best and cruelty and callousness at worst.”

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it; courage is a virtue, as it’s being fully aware of the danger you’re facing while trying to achieve a goal that is more important, said Marsh. Booker felt fear while saving his neighbor’s daughter from the fire, but that did not stop him from acting. 

“In terrifying situations, people who act heroically often feel terrified. What distinguishes them from everybody else is not how they feel. It’s what they do. They move toward the source of the danger, rather than away from it, because somebody else is in danger,” Marsh said. “That is a huge leap in understanding the origins of real courage.”

Patient SM could not tell when someone felt fear or what situations would cause fear due to her lack of an amygdala. This blindness to fear helped Marsh understand what could increase courage in others. 

“People who don’t recognize that threats cause fear think it’s more morally acceptable to make threats,” Marsh said. “… We’ve done lots of brain imaging research in adults and children who have psychopathic traits, and we consistently find that those with higher levels of psychopathy have smaller amygdalas.”

This discovery led Marsh to see if the amygdala had direct correlation to someone’s courage.

“It may be that heroes are more sensitive to fear and that’s what moves them to act,” Marsh said. “… It turns out, that is exactly the case.”

Marsh and her colleagues looked at what she called “altruistic kidney donors” who underwent surgery for someone they had not met before. They compared 20 altruistic kidney donors and 20 typical adults and found that the former are more responsive to people’s fear and can recognize others’ fear better than the typical person. 

“We brought three winners of the Carnegie Medal for Heroism to Georgetown to scan their brains as part of an episode of ‘60 Minutes,’ and all of these heroes had saved the life of someone else, at significant risk,” Marsh said. 

They ran the same tests from the kidney donors and found that those heroes, on average, have bigger amygdalas than typical adults.

 “Heroes are not less sensitive to risk and danger than the average person. They’re more sensitive to it because their empathy for other people’s fear moves them to help,” Marsh said. “This is not the end of the story. It can’t be the entire explanation, because plenty of people have less fear systems and the capacity for empathy, but they’re not particularly courageous.”

The best way to overcome fear is through learning and deliberately exposing yourself to fear in small doses, Marsh said. Alex Honnold, a rock climber who ascends mountains without the use of ropes, has a normal amygdala and does feel fear, but because of his exposure to rock climbing he has the ability to stay calm during it.

“Fear is really important for developing courage in certain situations. … You often find out that real life heroes have some kind of prototyping that taught them to act — they were in the military, or they were lifeguards, or even firefighters,” Marsh said. 

Marsh studied a personality test of 500 adults, 200 who were categorized as typical adults and 300 who were categorized as heroes. In this test, it was found that the adults are mostly similar besides two traits: honesty and humility. 

“We found that humility was correlated with another outcome called social discounting. In a social discounting task, people have the option of keeping some amount of real resources, like money, for themselves, or sharing with somebody else at a cost to themselves,” Marsh said. “Most people will share to benefit people who are close to them, but their choices become … less generous the more distant the beneficiary.” 

This led researchers to believe that people who are heroic and have courageous traits actually value other people more than the typical adult. They often do not see that they are not any more special than the other person, Marsh said. Psychologists say one of the few ways to increase humility is through gratitude exercises, much like how fear exercises can increase courage. 

“There are a few better cures for self focus than to think about all the ways you’ve benefited from other people’s help,” Marsh said “… It does reduce a person’s sense of self-importance, relative to others, and heightens your sense of connectedness to all the people around you to think of yourself as part of this larger fabric of helping.”

This practice can reduce depression and social anxiety, as it takes your attention off yourself, said Marsh. The best way to encourage courageousness is to face fear.

“The contemplative and profoundly moving acts of the many heroes around us — and so many people are heroes in the background — can also inspire a sense of awe, and humility and gratitude,” Marsh said. “It certainly has for me, and I hope it has for you as well.”

PUSH Buffalo’s Rahwa Ghirmatzion traces history, work combating housing injustices

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Buffalo was once one of America’s prized cities. It had the sixth-largest economy among U.S. cities and a world-leading port. Today, it’s behind only Cleveland and Detroit as the United States’ poorest city.

A residual of the decisions that contributed to that downfall is historic and institutionalized disadvantage to its African American residents, according to Rahwa Ghirmatzion, the executive director of People United for Sustainable Housing — or PUSH — Buffalo, who spoke Wednesday, Aug. 10 in the Amphitheater for the Chautauqua Lecture Series.

Ghirmatzion is a trained community health worker and currently serves on the board of People’s Action Institute, a national multi-issue affiliate organization. She was born in Eritrea, a country in northeast Africa along the Red Sea, in the midst of a 30-year war for independence. At age 5, her family fled to Sudan following a dramatic 16-day journey. Her family emigrated three years later to Western New York.

Speaking under the umbrella of Week Seven’s theme, “More than Shelter: Redefining the American Home,” Ghirmatzion shared her experiences with PUSH Buffalo in combating housing injustices and reinvigorating Buffalo neighborhoods.

Ghirmatzion began by tracing Buffalo’s history. She shared a map of Buffalo in 1805, which she described as “a village rich with waterways and canals, innovation, and full of violence and destruction to Indigenous people and the environment.”

Following construction of the Erie Canal, Buffalo became the world’s largest freshwater port. Factory production drew immigrants and migrants from Europe and African Americans from the South. Ghirmatzion said it became an “industrial heartland” during the two world wars, and the birthplace of commercial aviation and innovations — including air conditioning.

“This is one of the best planned cities in America,” Ghirmatzion said, referring to early Buffalo. 

Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed the city’s Delaware and Humboldt parks, linked together by tree-lined Humboldt Parkway. 

“The city contains buildings designed by American architecture masters, like Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, Henry Hobson Richardson and Louise Blanchard Bethune,” she said, “making Buffalo one of the most architecturally significant cities in America.”

Buffalo’s subsequent decline, Ghirmatzion said, is partly a product of city planners’ and federal housing officials’ decision to facilitate urban flight.

She said that flight was propelled by the creation of the Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, and Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, or HLC, a government agency established in 1933 to stabilize real estate that had depreciated during the economic depression and to refinance urban mortgage debt. While HLC provided mortgages to rescue homeowners from bank foreclosures, the FHA offered insurance to guarantee that homeowners would repay their loans. That led to the practice of redlining, in which mortgages and insurance were denied to people living in neighborhoods considered high-risk for investment. Many of these neighborhoods were home to underrepresented minority populations.

“The FHA, the government agency, codified existing redlining housing discrimination regimes; discrimination that runs through all markets, labor and all services that still permeate today,” Ghirmatzion said, pointing to data that showed 81% of investment was in Buffalo’s suburbs. “It shows you this extractive economy that is already building where, again, it’s privileging some areas and disadvantaging others.”

The phenomenon was furthered in 1963, when the Kensington Expressway decimated the bucolic parks and parkway that linked Buffalo’s Black and white neighborhoods.

“What was called progress was just another moment of violence to Black Buffalo and the ecology,” Ghirmatzion said. The expressway “cut down the middle of what was at the time … a burgeoning Black middle-class community to make way for quick transportation of white people from the city to white suburbia.”

In the post-World War II era, Buffalo suffered a drastic decline, with the blame variously placed on failed leadership, natural resource depletion, environmental problems, and even oppressive taxes. Whatever the cause, the effect was deindustrialization and a loss of about half its population. By 1970, Buffalo’s population had dropped drastically from its former peak.

“Industry has left Buffalo with brown fields, waterways and the collapse of the working class,” she said. “This leads to a 50-year economic decline, taking Buffalo from the sixth-largest economy in the nation to the third-poorest city, only coming in behind Detroit and Cleveland.”

Enter PUSH Buffalo, founded in 2005. Ghirmatzion said PUSH Buffalo aims to address the root causes of the systemic oppression of Buffalo’s history — to create strong neighborhoods with affordable housing and local employment; and to advance racial economic and environmental justice.

PUSH Buffalo is not a city agency. In fact, its success is owed to mobilizing its members to advocate, even pressure, local officials, even as it works with grassroots groups around Western New York. 

“Our theory of change revolves around community control, community ownership, and of resources and the just transition strategy framework for transformative structural change,” Ghirmatzion said.

Realizing the world’s – and Buffalo’s — immersion in an “extractive” economy that “digs, burns, and dumps,” Ghirmatzion said PUSH advocates for a “regenerative” alternative.

That green alternative exists “where the worldview is censored in caring and sacredness of our humanity, where resources are renewable energy sources and circular economies, where our work is actually cooperative and our purpose is restoring ecological harmony,” Ghirmatzion said. 

On the west side of Buffalo, PUSH advocated for a 20-square-block green development zone, now expanded to 40 square blocks.

One of its highest-profile projects has been public school No. 77, circa 1927, which was eyeballed by developers for a condo complex, meaning imminent gentrification of the zone. PUSH Buffalo stalled the city’s approval for several years while it polled the community on how to use the building. Instead of high-end condos, there will instead be 30 affordable senior apartments.

“It’s the people that are of and from the community that not only designed it, planned for it, helped raise the money, co-designed the spaces, but now they are also the stakeholders that utilize it,” she said.

PUSH also works to restore vacant properties, using green construction methods such as sustainable roofs and solar panels. Other community features address the problem of stormwater runoff, with features such as parking pads that filter rainwater, rain gardens and vegetated stormwater planters.

PUSH Buffalo has spent $84 million in green affordable housing, green infrastructure and stormwater management in the green development zone. It owns about 150 parcels of land. More than a thousand homes have been weatherized, or subjected to a “green retrofit.” Ghirmatzion shared that in April 2022, PUSH Buffalo broke ground on 14 sites across its green development zone.

“We’re the small little seeds of decency that we can plant today and tomorrow, for the next generation or two,” Ghirmatzion said. “… We often say what the hands do, teaches the heart.”

Ghirmatzion closed by challenging the audience.

“What did you learn today to go back where you are, what’s a small little thing that you can do to continue to build on those cells of decency for collective impact that will lead to our collective liberation?” she said. 

MacArthur ‘Genius’ Matthew Desmond examines eviction crisis, offers possible solutions

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The struggling single mother who committed armed robbery to make rent. The war veteran with amputated legs working laboriously to pay off his rent to his landlord. The elderly woman who pays 70% of her income to stay in a condemned home that was declared a biohazard by the city. These are the faces behind the pink papers on the doors that evict about 3.6 million Americans a year. 

While eviction may seem faceless, just a word to those untouched by housing displacement, it affects real people. In pursuit of understanding why eviction happens in America, over the course of a year, author Matthew Desmond followed eight families facing homelessness in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a journey he detailed thoroughly in his book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Living in a mobile park in the South Side of Milwaukee, and later in a house in the North Side, Desmond watched the process unfold for both the evicted and the evictees. 

“I was going about this work, and then there were all of these questions that kept springing to mind that were just beyond the reach of normal reporting,” Desmond said. “ ‘How often do people get evicted? Who gets evicted? What are the long-term consequences of getting tossed from your home?’ I went looking for some answers, at least some data to support this kind of inquiry, and I got nothing. I decided to click the data myself.”

In writing his book, Desmond collected hundreds of millions of eviction records. In Milwaukee, he surveyed over 1,000 renters and 250 tenants in eviction court and looked over 100,000 eviction case records. 

Dylan Townsend / staff photographer Matthew Desmond, the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, gives his presentation for both the Chautauqua Lecture Series and the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle on his Pulitzer-winning book ­Evicted Tuesday in the Amphitheater.

“I tried to write a book that brought all of this stuff together, to combine big data with the small data, and things that I was learning on the ground every day in Milwaukee,” Desmond said. “In that spirit, Evicted is really a book that starts on the ground and ends on the ground.”

Desmond told the eviction story of America to Chautauquans at 10:45 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 9 in the Amphitheater in his lecture titled after his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Desmond’s discussion of how and why eviction happens in the country was part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Seven theme, “More than Shelter: Redefining the American Home,” and the Chautauqua Literary and Science Circle’s 2022 vertical theme, “Home.”

Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and winner of the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” as well as the founder of the Eviction Lab, which published the first national dataset of evictions in the United States in 2018. In addition to Evicted, Desmond has authored several books, including On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters.

In addition to the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, Evicted has amassed the National Books Critics Circle Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and more; it was also cited as one of the best books of the year by over three dozen media outlets. 

Desmond chose one particular narrative of a single, Black Milwaukee mother named Arleen, and her children Ger-Ger, Boosie, Jori and Jafaris, to lay out how eviction happens in the country. He said Arleen’s story provides a lens through which people can understand and empathize with the housing injustices plaguing America. 

Arleen’s eviction experience started with an enraged man kicking down the door of her home after Jori threw a snowball at his car. The landlord swiftly kicked them out after the incident, leading them to stay at the Salvation Army until Arleen found another place to live. She bought a house for a little over $500, but it had no running water. 

“When we looked at that survey data and we asked, ‘What happens to families after they get evicted?’ a big thing that we learned is that they move into much worse housing than they lived in before,” Desmond said. “If we want to nail a kid who lives with lead paint, exposed wires, no heat, no water, a big reason is families are forced to accept these conditions in the harried aftermath of an eviction.”

The city found the house unfit for human habitation, sending Arleen and her sons back on the streets without a home. They then moved to an apartment on a block ridden with crime and drug activity.

“The fact that she was kicked out of this place was pretty important for understanding how she ended up in such a dangerous part of the city,” Desmond said. “… We found that you can control a lot of things, and you still see families who get evicted moving from high-crime neighborhoods into more dangerous neighborhoods in the city, from poor neighborhoods to even more impoverished communities. Eviction seems to push families deeper into disadvantage.”

Arleen quickly moved to another house in poor condition on the North Side of Milwaukee. With utilities excluded, the property cost $550 a month — 88% of Arleen’s entire welfare check. 

“Arleen is not alone in spending the vast majority of her income on housing,” Desmond said. “For 100 years, there’s been this idea, this consensus in America, that we should spend 30% of our income on rent. That gives us enough money to feed our kids, save and afford a car. For a long part of our history, a lot of us met that goal. But times have changed.”

Most poor, renting Americans spend nearly half of their income on rent and utilities, and one-fourth of those families spend over 70% of their income on rent and utilities, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey. 

“If you want a roof over your head and hot water, under these conditions, you don’t need to make a huge mistake or have a big emergency hit your life to get evicted,” Desmond said. “Something as small as a snowball can do it. For folks like Arleen, eviction is much more of an inevitability than responsibility.”

Desmond laid out three reasons for the rise in rent, the first being that the income rate of Americans without a college education has been stagnant over the last 40 years, according to a population survey directed by the U.S. Census Bureau. 

Second, housing costs soared nationally within that same time period. Since 1985, rent has outplaced income gains by 315%.

The third reason is that federal government programs have little reach. Three-fourths of renting families below the poverty line receive no housing assistance, and those that have government housing often wait for years before they receive it, Desmond said, referencing the American Housing Survey.

Arleen tried to put her name on a government housing list only to find it had been frozen, with 3,500 families in Milwaukee and a wait time of five years; five years is a short wait compared to other cities, according to Desmond.

“The waiting list for public housing in our biggest cities is not counted in years anymore,” Desmond said. “It’s counted in decades.”

A notice for a welfare appointment was sent to Arleen’s old address and she missed the meeting, causing her $628-a-month check to be reduced. This, in combination with funeral expenses for a loved one, caused Arleen to fall two months behind on rent, and she was evicted yet again. 

“When we think of the typical low income family today, when it comes to housing situations, we shouldn’t think of them like living in public housing or getting any kind of help from the government to make rent,” Desmond said. “We should think of someone like Arleen, because she’s our typical case.”

Milwaukee has over 130,000 rental homes, and every year, the city evicts 16,000 people. One in 14 houses in Black neighborhoods are evicted in an average year, according to Desmond’s “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty” article, which looked at the repercussions of inner-city evictions. 

In Desmond’s research, he found that “eviction is a cause, not just a condition of property.” 

“The home is the center of life,” Desmond said. “It’s our refuge from work. It’s our protection from the street. It’s where we go to let down. It’s where we remove our masks and shoes and (that) language is spoken all over the world. … Home is not just shelter, but like warmth, family, community, the womb. (When evicted,) families lose their homes, but children also lose their school. You lose your neighborhood. You lose your connections.”

Eviction proves to be particularly harsh for women of color, especially single, African American mothers. Desmond’s research shows that one in five Black women in Milwaukee report being evicted at least once in their life. 

“Eviction is something like the feminine equivalent to incarceration,” Desmond said. “We know that many poor, African American men are being swept out over the criminal justice system, being locked up. Many poor, African American women are being locked out and disproportionately bearing the brunt of the eviction crisis.”

For adults with children, the likelihood of eviction and homelessness rise. 

“This is a problem that affects young and old, the sick and the able-bodied,” Desmond said. “The face of our eviction epidemic is the smallest of kids. Go into any housing court around the country and you see a ton of kids running around.” 

Arleen’s eviction record — and the fact that she had children — prompted landlords to turn her away from a total of 90 homes. Arleen finally was accepted into a one-bedroom apartment, but was shortly kicked out after an incident involving Jori and his teacher that required the police to come to her home. 

“When I started this work, I thought kids would shield you from eviction,” Desmond said. “It’s the opposite. In fact, that study we did in eviction court, we were trying to crack that mystery. Why do you get evicted? It wasn’t your race. It wasn’t your gender. It wasn’t how much you owed. It was kids. The chance of you getting an eviction judgment tripled if you lived with kids.”

Having an eviction record also bars families from safer housing; Desmond said he met many landlords who would not accept a tenant with an eviction in the last two to three years.

“If you’re carrying around evictions like this, they follow you,” Desmond said. “They haunt you. This is the reason why families move into worse housing into worse neighborhoods after they get evicted, because there are limits.”

When Desmond began his journey to understanding evictions in America, he had no data to draw on. Seeing the shortage of information around evictions, he founded the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, a data resource for the public about evictions in America. In 2018, it released the first-ever comprehensive dataset on evictions with millions of data points collected all the way back to 2000. 

“We have collected millions and tens of millions and over 100 million eviction records from all over the country, and published them. … One thing we learn is every year in America, 3.6 million evictions are filed,” he said. “About seven evictions are filed a minute every year.”

The hope is that compiling research and data about evictions can help policymakers and communities target the issue head-on. 

While the eviction crisis pervades the United States, Desmond’s research offers good news and hope of progress in smaller areas of the country. New York’s eviction rates in 2020 were much lower than what was expected under normal conditions, and remained low even after the COVID-19 eviction moratorium expired. The strides the country has made in the last century of revitalizing communities show what can be done for the eviction crisis today. 

To pull communities out of the eviction crisis, Desmond suggests that the government expand the existing legislation of the Housing Choice Voucher Program. 

“If you qualify for this program, you benefit from the program,” Desmond said. “You can take this voucher. You can look anywhere you want in the private market, as long as your housing isn’t too expensive or too crummy. Instead of paying 50, 60, 70% of your income on rent, you would pay 30% and the voucher would cover the rest. That would fundamentally change the face of poverty in America.”

Two questions arise from this suggestion: Would the expansion be a disincentive to work, and can taxpayers afford it?

Research shows there is no relationship between housing and work, Desmond said, and he predicts that if adults worked less with this voucher, they are most likely spending time with their families.

“I think that if we’re honest with ourselves, the status quo is a much bigger threat to work and self-sufficiency than any affordable housing program could be,” Desmond said. “… Many can’t hold their jobs down long enough, because they can’t hold their homes down.”

In terms of national expense, Desmond points to a jarring statistic: The year Arleen was evicted, the country devoted $41 billion to housing assistance, where $170 billion was allocated on homeowner tax. That $170 billion is equivalent to the entire budget for the Departments of Education, Veteran Affairs, Homeland Security, Justice and Agriculture — combined. 

“Most of that benefit goes to families with six-figure incomes, because if you have a bigger income, you can get a bigger mortgage, take a bigger deduction,” Desmond said. “… If poverty persists in America, it’s not for lack of resources. We lack something else.”

A few years ago, the Bipartisan Policy Center calculated that to address the eviction crisis, the nation would need to devote an additional $22 billion. As rent increases, its calculations fluctuate from $22 billion to $40 billion to $45 billion. 

“These are not small figures,” Desmond said. “But this is well within our capacity. We have the money. We just made decisions about how to spend it. Every year, homeowner tax subsidies far, far outpace direct housing assistance. We already have a universal housing program. It’s an entitlement. It’s just not for poor people.”

While promising, this solution isn’t the only one that can solve the housing crisis; Desmond calls on people to work with housing equality organizations and educate themselves about a system that does not affect them directly, but does affect their neighbors and fellow citizens. 

“This degree of inequality, and this level and depth of social suffering, and this cold denial of basic human need, this isn’t us,” Desmond said. “This doesn’t have to be us.”

In concluding his lecture, Desmond asked Chautauquans to think of their communities and what America could be if people uplifted those like Arleen when they’re faced with eviction. 

“Poverty reduces people born from better things,” Desmond said. “Arleen didn’t want some small life. She didn’t want to make a living gaming the system. She wanted to work and contribute. Poverty is complicated, but a stable home is a great way to give folks like Arleen a shot at realizing their full potential.”

‘Post’ columnist Megan McArdle opens week examining history of housing trends

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As a writer, Megan McArdle spends a lot of time thinking about words. She encouraged the audience at her 10:45 a.m. lecture Monday, Aug. 8 in the Amphitheater to do the same, and specifically contemplate the word “house.” With that, she opened up Week Seven’s Chautauqua Lecture Series theme on “More than Shelter: Redefining the American Home.”

McArdle not only writes about economics, finance and government policy for The Washington Post, but she has also run her own blog since 2001, which was recently renamed “Asymmetrical Information.” In her lecture, “Homebound,” she addressed the history of housing and, ultimately, what housing allows us to do.

Although McArdle grew up on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, her idea of “house” was a little box she would draw as a kid with a triangle on top. This simple house was, of course, inhabited by a stick figure family.

“This captures so much about how we have come at housing in this country over the past half century. … The problem with our housing policy is we’re not actually dealing with a generic box house or stick figures. We’re dealing with this very, very, very complex product,” McArdle said.

Housing is essential because it impacts every aspect of our lives, she explained. From where children go to school, to where we work, to who our neighbors are — it is all impacted by housing.

“I won’t say that housing is everything, but boy, it is the lynchpin of almost everything that matters, and so, of course, this complex thing can’t be a generic commodity that’s covered by housing policy,” she said. “It’s as complicated as we are.”

Because of this, McArdle believes housing is not interchangeable with the word “home.” While housing policies might deal with the space where people actually lay their heads at night, home is about communities, and how those communities affect people’s lives.

“We talk about ‘housing’ in the abstract, but ‘home’ is in the specific. You go house hunting, but you find a home — because a home is where the people stop being stick figures and they start being individuals,” McArdle said.

To delve into this concept more fully, McArdle discussed the history of housing. For hundreds of years, the idea of a house looked the same to a lot of people because many people farmed for a living, specifically in the United States. She quoted a statistic that 72% of Americans worked in agriculture in 1820. This impacted where their house was: on or near the land they farmed.

One hundred years later, in 1920, just 30% of the workforce was in agriculture, and that again affected where people lived.

“There’s obviously a lot of cost to that. Anyone who has read Dickens is well aware,” she said. “But there’s also a lot of great things about that. We get a lot richer. We get a lot more prosperous. And then we start getting healthier.”

The Industrial Revolution initiated a widespread move to cities, which McArdle believes was only made possible by a housing revolution. During that 100-period, she said the population of New York City increased from 152,000 to 5.6 million. To make space for all these people, apartment buildings skyrocketed.

But apartment buildings were not a new invention created to deal with the 20th-century issue, McArdle explained. Ancient Rome also had apartment buildings.

“While the Romans were actually good with concrete, they were missing the two inventions you need if you really want to stack people safely and comfortably, which is structural steel and elevators — actually, really, elevator brakes,” she said. “It’s not that hard to build an elevator, but it’s hard to build an elevator that will go tall without killing you if it falls. That was the big innovation.”

The next big innovation was sanitation. The increased emphasis on sanitary measures made cities more inhabitable — and more enticing.

“Suddenly, for the first time in human history, cities are not death traps (of disease). … For the first time, you can go there safely, live comfortably with the new technologies that we have, with a ton of new people in a very small space,” she said.

These changes to make cities safe to live in were not cheap, McArdle added, but they happened because people enjoy being around other people. Cities make it possible to surround oneself with new people and new ideas.

“They’re the best places for spreading ideas. They’re phenomenally productive,” she said.

McArdle believes a reason the United States is successful is because so many people immigrated in from all over the world, bringing their cultures and ideas.

But the existence of cities relies on housing and, McArdle said, sprawl — which she acknowledges is sort of a dirty word.

The area of Manhattan where she grew up used to be known as Strycker’s Bay, long before her family lived there. It used to be a suburb, and the people would take a ferry into the city where they worked. Ferries, streetcars and trains create urban sprawl as they shorten the time it takes to get to work. McArdle pointed out that commute is an essential factor in where people decide to live.

Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti coined a concept now known as the Marchetti’s Constant, which says that people are willing to commute 30 minutes one way to go to work. McArdle views Marchetti’s Constant as key in explaining how communities are built; as commuting technologies advance and it takes less time to get to work, people move farther away from their workplaces. Increased car ownership led people to choose to live outside the city, she said.

“The old model of the suburbs was determined by the technology (like trains)that had shaped it,” she said. “… That dictated what we might call a walk-to-ride model, where you ride to a fixed destination and walk around the neighborhood. … The car doesn’t have that constraint.” 

McArdle acknowledged that the racism of “white flight” contributed to suburbanization.

“We shouldn’t forget all of those harms and all of the ways in which this was bad for us and for the environment,” McArdle said. 

Still, the mass movement  signified people’s desires to live in suburbs. 

“People weren’t just running away from the city’s problems or interracial panic; they were running to something that they wanted,” she said. “People really like single-family, detached homes with big yards where kids can play or they can sit out on a summer evening.”

Cheaper cars made it possible for the middle class, who lived in the city, to move out to the suburbs and buy detached homes in a movement McArdle called the Great Inversion.

“Historically, in cities, rich people lived close to the center because that’s where the center of the action was. Poor people ended up in a long, dismal walk away on the periphery,” she said. “In the second half of the 20th century, that pattern reverses. Suddenly, the affluent are living in a ring, and what we have in the center is people who have been left behind by the departing.”

We should not romanticize a time when people of all social classes lived together, McArdle said, because economic and racial injustices were still prevalent. Although, wealthy people living in city centers advocated for things like clean water, which positively impacted everyone living in that area.

“If you’re a billionaire on Fifth Avenue, you want the subway to work, you want crime to be low, you want your water to be clean, you want the electric utilities to be competent,” she said. “And it’s hard to have those things just for yourself.”

Twenty years ago, people started to notice that the opposite of the Great Inversion was happening. More young people who move to the cities are staying longer, delaying having children and focusing on work. But McArdle believes it started happening much sooner than the year 2000. 

Housing prices rise, and McArdle said a way to combat this is to build more places for people to live — in cities, this requires building upward. However, people fight against more housing being built.

“Suburbs had long used zoning codes and other tricks to keep out ‘the undesirables.’ Cities now get into that game,” she said. “A lot of early gentrifiers were outraged to discover that when they had finally got done fixing up the place just like they liked it, some big developer would come in and want to slap up a giant apartment building so a bunch of newcomers could enjoy the hard-won amenities in this beautiful neighborhood that you had just built.”

Activists who want to conserve the communities that they and their families grew up in fight against developers coming in and building more housing. McArdle said this often doesn’t work in their favor because the lack of new development means the housing is limited, prices go up, and ultimately, rich people still move into those communities.

“In the abstract, we all favor more housing,” she said. “But in the specific, we like our home just the way it is; that is, after all, why we chose to live there. So over the last 20 years, demand just keeps going up and up, while supply is going much more slowly. And that’s the housing crisis.”

Housing issues also exist in small towns and their communities. Often, McArdle said, the message to people who live in small towns is to move somewhere they can get a more lucrative job.

“If you don’t have a lot of money,” she said, “you tend to substitute social capital for financial capital.”

This means that people in small towns rely on family members to watch their children or call up a friend to fix their plumbing, rather than paying someone they don’t know, McArdle explained. When you live like this, it builds community, and that makes it even harder to leave.

“I love cities,” McArdle said. “I’ve lived in a city all my life. I’m not really sure I can live anywhere else. But there are a lot of people who don’t feel like me, and the only advice that we could give them was, ‘Be more like me.’ ”

Often, moving to a city doesn’t solve a person’s financial problems. For example, in California, teachers make double what teachers in Mississippi make, but in California, the cost of living is more expensive in terms of housing, groceries and taxes. It is, therefore, not always a smart financial decision to move somewhere just because the salary is higher.

“I’ve been talking in the present tense, even though I’m not really talking about the present. I’m talking about the economy as it looked on March 7, 2020,” she said.

McArdle believes the pandemic might have shown the United States a different method to approach the housing crisis.

“The pandemic has shown us a way around the bottlenecks we’ve created by refusing to build in the biggest cities,” she said.

A large answer to being able to live where we want and work where we want might come down to working remotely, which is made possible by platforms like Zoom.

“We should think of Zoom … as a technological transformation that eases the Marchetti Constant. In some cases, it blows it up,” she said. “Imagine a world where you can commute to anywhere in the world in 30 seconds. That’s exciting, right? It opens up so much land we could build on. And we could, if we could get our regulatory act together.”

Zoom can make new communities possible, she said. As of right now, building houses is expensive, but McArdle thinks we need to reimagine that. Instead of bringing all the materials to the site and building there, people should look more into modular homes. McArdle pointed to how some start-ups are even 3D printing homes.

“If we could make it work, we could be looking at some of the most exciting changes to American communities in decades, if not centuries,” she said. “We could make it easier for people to move out to the country. We could make it easier for people to move back to cities like Buffalo, which has a ton of lovely old houses and an amazing history — and a convenient location near some of the most beautiful scenery on Earth.”

She described it as reversing the vacuum. Instead of cities sucking in people and resources, people can spread back out and cover more land because they can work remotely.

“I’ve spoken to so many people, from Rochester and Syracuse and Buffalo and the towns around them, who wanted nothing more than to be here spending six months of every year scraping the snow off their windshield, but they couldn’t,” she said. “They had to leave home and everything they loved because they’d get a better job in the city or better house in the Sun Belt.”

While it might be a dream for some to live anywhere and work remotely, McArdle thinks the future of work looks more like a hybrid model, with people commuting in only a couple days a week rather than five.

“So now the Marchetti Constant — don’t think of it on a daily basis, but on a weekly basis,” she said.

This would mean people might be more willing to commute for longer, if they do not have to commute as frequently. McArdle thinks this would create more of a sprawl, which could help housing prices.

She knows, however, that not everyone can choose to work remotely. Some jobs cannot be done over Zoom. For those, they need affordable housing, which McArdle said can happen by building more houses — or reworking office spaces left empty by the COVID-19 pandemic into housing options.

McArdle also considers what people will do with their ability to work remotely.

“To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to drink coffee while looking at beautiful scenery. I have been doing it for two days, and I am so grateful,” she said. “But I think if that’s all remote work does, is enable highly-paid professionals to enjoy themselves even more, while displacing locals, I think we’ve failed. We can do better than that. This is America. We can still do big things.”

McArdle circled back to the idea of home. When she thinks of home, she thinks of the Victorian chair that her mother used to rock and sing to her in before she went to bed. That chair now sits in the home McArdle shares with her husband and her dogs.

“I’m actually really asking you to look back on your own reflections about home,” she said. “When you were thinking about home, were you really thinking about a house, or were you thinking about the people who were in it? Were you thinking about the people who made that the place (where) you will always be safe and warm and at peace?”

When people think of the housing crisis, McArdle they often only think of the technical side: the physical space.

“Everyone needs someplace to keep the rain off of their heads, and we need to figure out how to give it to them. But we need to do so much more than that, because, in the end, we need a house,” she said. “But we are still, all of us, wanting something that’s so much more important. We are longing for home.”

Walter Mosley warns of parasitic influences of systems, technology

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Many people see technology as the gateway to the future, but mystery writer Walter Mosley believes that humans are ultimately heading toward an alluring mirage — a facade with a bright light — that is leading society into a dystopian world of darkness.

“Darkness is inside of us, yet we are unaware of it,” he said, “darkness that on a bright and sunny day, hides the truth from our eyes. … The world we think we know, knows us better. The truth is that we live mostly in darkness. Even on a bright and cloudless day, the things most important to us remain hidden.”    

Mosley gave the final lecture of the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Six theme, “After Dark: The World of Nighttime,” on Friday, Aug. 5 in the Amphitheater. Mosley is perhaps best known for his Easy Rawlins mystery series, in which he documents the African American experience from the deep South to the post-Obama era in New York City. Throughout his career, he has written more than 55 books, ranging all the way from crime novels to literary fiction, to nonfiction and political essays.

Instead of talking about his profession, he decided to speak to Chautauquans about the themes of darkness and night. He believes that the two words can carry multiple connotations, depending on their usage. 

“The concept of night cannot be pinned down because it doesn’t mean one thing,” he said. “We can see this in the many phrases used today that contain the word — fly-by-night, night owl, one-night stand, good night, two ships passing in the night, the night is young, and burning the midnight oil.” 

In his talk, however, he referred to darkness and night as the “unknowns.” He explained how humans have developed an intense fear of uncertainty — of “what they don’t know” and of beliefs that challenge their existing ways of seeing the world. 

He distinguished between two different types of darkness — one that is unconscious and uncontrollable, and another that is avoidable and technologically self-induced. 

One of the darknesses he mentioned is the human discomfort with subversive beliefs and elements, which he believes has led to widespread social issues, including political polarization. 

“The desire to eradicate any notion that interferes with the ideas of ourselves is paramount when we feel threatened on a global scale,” he said. “Many members of the left interpret words long ago as if they were uttered in opposition to today’s aesthetic. … In much the same way, today, members of the right misinterpret the meaning of concepts like Critical Race Theory in an attempt to protect themselves from being humiliated by their own history.” 

Humans have repeatedly sought out ways to come to terms with the unknown darknesses of life, such as death, aging and the passage of time. While clocks and other man-made creations are often used to cope with these uncertainties, he emphasized that time, which he referred to as a “source of modern distress,” is not actually quantifiable. Rather, it is a completely human concept.

“As children, we were all taught that time existed on a circular disk that was broken into 12 numbers representing 24 hours and 700 tiny increments,” Mosley said. “These hours and minutes are all equidistant, inferring that the passage of time between each indicator is also equal. We were taught that, in essence, time is an absolute and we can trust it to pass equally for all.”

But time does not pass evenly, he said, and then cited the rapid growth of digital technologies since World War I.

“All the way back to the beginning of human awareness, knowledge grew by 100% every 100 years or so,” he said. “… Before World War I, from one generation to the next, there was very little difference in how we were connected through technology and resulting technique, with bows and arrows, ironwork, agriculture, and other uniquely human modes of labor remained little changed in a century. … (Now) it doesn’t take five generations for knowledge to double. It doesn’t take a century, only somewhere around a year.”

With such immense changes, comes an increase in the velocity of time. 

“A threat, or simply a challenge,” Mosley said; he believes this rush is causing society to plunge further into the apocalypse of darkness. 

“These (technologies) are the intelligent parasites that control our hearts and minds,” he said. “… Even the physical systems of the Earth itself are deeply impacted by our economy and our technologies, but like any intricately involved parasite, these systems subtly and unconsciously take over our lives and bid us to the will of an inhuman system. It is the theme of many science fiction novels and movies, that a league of super-intelligent computers will one day soon take over. … As you may be able to tell, I believe in this apocalyptic prophecy.”

While many people believe that technology is aiding their lives, Mosley said that it may be actually dictating them, whether they are conscious of it or not. He referenced Sigmund Freud’s theory of hysterical blindness, which posits that an individual may consciously prevent themselves from seeing the dangers of a situation. 

Mosley believes humans are becoming small parts in a large technological machine, and urged Chautauquans to reconsider their usage of digital innovations in an attempt to open and enlighten their eyes. 

“Systems of trade and technique have blinded us to anything except their own glittering promise. And so, darkness — that which is hidden from sight. We live within systems that hide away from perceptions,” Mosley said. “We believe we are freely making decisions. … This, I believe, is the curse of night on humanity.”

Because of this, we’ve become a curse on the flora and fauna of this world, he said, and abandoned philosophical thought.

“We have lost our connections in this forever night, and until we are reunited, the sun will not rise,” Mosley said.

Sheena Jardine-Olade defines importance of nighttime economies

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No matter what Sheena Jardine-Olade does, in work, school, or leisure, it all comes back to the night. She loves it, and her hope for the audience at her Thursday lecture in the Amphitheater was that Chautauquans might fall a little more in love with the night, too — or at least learn how to think about it a little differently.

Jardine-Olade, who gave her lecture on “Equity and the 24-Hour City” as part of Week Six’s theme, “After Dark: The World of Nighttime,” opened with a land acknowledgment for both the ground on which she stood at in Chautauqua — the Erie and the Haudenosaunee — and for where she was born in Ottawa — the Anishinaabe.

She now lives in Vancouver, where she’s an equity planner for the city, and is co-founder of the consultancy group Night Lab, whose specialty is nighttime governance structures of municipalities. It’s the first nighttime economy development group in Canada. 

“I am a person who loves nightlife, the night economy, and night activities,” Jardine-Olade said. “In fact, I spend most of my time thinking about how we can cultivate our 24-hour day and strategically think of the hours between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.”

She invited the audience to think about what goes into planning for a city-centered vacation: restaurants, music venues, cultural attractions. But no city report or tourism brochure is complete without mentioning a great night out.

But what is the nighttime economy? Jardine-Olade ran through a couple definitions, but landed simply on the world between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.

“That’s it. I feel anyone within that time, when I discuss the nighttime economy, falls within my purview,” she said. “Nighttime economy ‘Level One’ is when we  think about live music, clubs, restaurants, evening games, casinos, theaters, operas, night markets, street festivals and fireworks.”

Digging deeper, one considers doctors, nurses, firefighters, police and safety services, airports, and transportation workers. Even further, she asked, what else is going on while most of us sleep? Sanitation workers, factory workers, hotel staff and gig economy workers all are making their livings in the dark.

“When we think about the NTE, our mind always flips to the consumptive side — the revelry, the entertainment,” Jardine-Olade said. “But what about the productive side and the vital services that are components of this large, nighttime economy machine?”

A city with a strong nighttime economy is efficient in terms of public infrastructure — by sheer necessity. A solid NTE (Jardine-Olade’s shorthand) is good for branding, tourism and reputation. Vibrant NTEs create a unique culture, are good for attracting and retaining populations, support tech and start-up workers, and — her favorite — foster social cohesion from authentic experiences.

It’s only been within the past 10 years or so that cities have begun to consider the impact of NTE, but Jardine-Olade said that what we know so far is that in 2020, China’s nighttime economy grossed $4.6 trillion; in 2017, tourists in Toronto spent $8.8 billion on nighttime tourism; NTE contributed to 4% of Australia’s GDP and 6% of the U.K.’s GDP; in Berlin, 35% of tourists take part in NTE activities — 150,000 visitors every weekend. And in New York City, the nighttime economy brings them $35.1 billion a year and has created 300,000 jobs.

But, “what about the things that go bump in the night?” Jardine-Olade said. “Good question.”

Safety, noise, gentrification and residential conflicts top the list of concerns when considering a nighttime economy, and when determining what the right approach to NTE is in an individual city, “you have to determine what the drivers for your nighttime governance look like,” she said.

Most strategies at the moment fall into one of three categories: Public safety, revitalization and tourism, or resource distribution.

“Public safety is usually a top priority and a key goal for both residents, as well as municipalities,” Jardine-Olade said. “While cities with a vibrant nightlife do face challenges in public safety, including alcohol-fueled challenges to public order, a 24-hour city can actually improve public safety by providing additional eyes on the streets and critical infrastructure needed to support 24-hour things, like public transit and increased lighting along main routes and residential areas.”

In terms of public safety, governments can — at best — encourage residents to feel comfortable and participate in nighttime activities. At worst, the focus centers bylaws, regulations, licenses, fees, taxes and a disproportionate police presence. 

A good example: In Amsterdam, a nightlife initiative was paired with a mobile app to immediately report nuisances or threats. There was a 25% reduction in crime, she said, and a 30% increased perception of safety.

A bad example: New York City’s Cabaret Law, created in 1926 to make dancing illegal when three or more people were in a room unless an establishment had a license to operate. In a Prohibition effort to curb alcohol sales and enforce segregation, the law was weaponized against marginalized communities. It remained on the books until 2017.

To focus on revitalization and tourism, development offices use tools like tax breaks and other incentives focused on businesses, in the hopes those incentives will attract cultural and creative development.

“Often, the purpose is to re-energize downtown cores that have lost people or mass due to suburbanization or post-industry activity,” Jardine-Olade said. “Most of these efforts have worked very well when it comes to revitalization, and the injection of money usually creates vibrant entertainment districts. On the flip side, this can often act as a catalyst for gentrification.”

The final approach, she said, is a “fairly new take on night stewardship” — that of resource distribution and support services.

“Many realize now that the nighttime economy is merely an extension of the daytime economy,” Jardine-Olade said. “Policy-makers and planners and politicians realize the residents need access to amenities and essential services, the same ones they require during the day, as they do at nighttime.”

These services and amenities include policing, transportation, and food are needed by everyone, but marginalized communities need them even more, she said. Accessibility is important, especially with wayfinding and lighting solutions. This is a lot of municipal work; enter the night mayor.

“The idea (of the night mayor) was first conceptually introduced in the 1970s, and now it has taken off. There are 50-plus night mayors installed all across the world,” Jardine-Olade said, with different titles in different countries and different cities, but with essentially the same mission — providing municipal governments with the capacity to focus on nighttime management.

Across the world, some night mayors are internal to a specific government, external consultants, or a hybrid of the two. There are benefits and drawbacks to each, Jardine-Olade said, and limitations in either case can lead to a “focus on just one portion of the nighttime economy, the consumptive portion of the night, catering to demographics focused on a night out, tourism, or those who have the money to spend. That’s why many are slowing down to ask the question, exactly who are we planning for when we plan for the nighttime economy?”

Here, Jardine-Olade pointed to a photo of her mother in her PowerPoint above her in the Amp. A Triniadian immigrant to Canada, Jardine-Olade’s mother worked for $3.25 an hour, from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m., commuting long distances in terrible weather, often with no time to shop for groceries.

“That’s the question we need to ask ourselves. What about the people who are basically invisible to the policy-makers in the system, with the careers like my mother?” Jardine-Olade asked. “They are the cleaners, the drivers, the factory workers, the sex workers, the security workers, and people that go around in nighttime spaces and often fall through the cracks when we are considering about who we’re planning for.”

Jardine-Olade rattled off a list of what would cease to exist if not for these workers: Clean gyms, clean streets, coffee on a commute to work, no one-day Amazon packages.

“Even our evening experiences are facilitated by waiters, bartenders, cooks, often using secondary, part-time work to supplement low wages,” she said. “If you remember, many workers’ intersecting identities compound their ability to safely and comfortably navigate the night that is integral to their livelihood.” 

Thus, it is time to shift NTE from the top-down approach drawing on academics and experts. Cities need a bottom-up approach.

“We need to figure out exactly what cities, residents, and businesses with a focus on communities that have been particularly underserved actually need,” Jardine-Olade said.

With better citizen engagement and more fulsome discussions, cities can look deeper into how existing resources are deployed, or how new resources can be most practical and helpful. Even something as simple as increased, safe transportation and lighting, she said, can change the perception of public spaces. And then there are the resources that communities truly need, like 24-hour washrooms or phone-charging stations.

“Many times these amenities can be a lifeline for sex workers or those experiencing homelessness,” Jardine-Olade said. “But even beyond that, how many times have you been out in public and used a washroom or your phone died? Everyone can use these amenities and resources.”

Talking policy, governmental approaches and practical infrastructure for the NTE, for Jardine-Olade, stems from a very simple place, and one of her “most favorite things about the nighttime city” — social cohesion. She showed Chautauquans photos of herself at age 16, DJing at an underground music event. The warm reception she received in that community, at that age, is the reason she said she stood on the Amp stage now.

“As the main space for my social interaction, it has led to positions on municipal music advisory committees and eventually led to my degree in master’s in urban planning,” she said. “It also led to me consulting on the nighttime economy and my equity work. The relationships I made and causes I supported are a big part of who I am today. The nighttime economy provided invaluable social infrastructure for me and others in the community, and does so especially for queer communities and culturally based communities.”

These spaces were put at risk during COVID-19, making NTE stewardship all the more important now, she said. During the pandemic, Night Lab pivoted to partner with other organizations to offer services, “typically to underserved and marginalized populations to help them navigate the often-unwieldy processes” of businesses, permits and licensing to survive.

Closing her lecture, Jardine-Olade said she hoped the audience came away with, if not new information, a new way of thinking about the nighttime economy “in a more expansive way.”

“The key takeaway today is that the nighttime economy is a complex organism that is rapidly changing to meet the needs of the people and the surroundings,” she said. “Due to its complexity, night life moves beyond consumption and encompasses culture, production, social inclusion, and cohesion.”

She called on Chautauquans to help manage and support their own nighttime economies, starting small, starting collaboratively, starting from the bottom up.

Finally, she said, they must remember that “when we plan for the most vulnerable among us, we all benefit. By strategically allocating night resources in an equitable way, we can ensure that the invisible majority doesn’t get lost, especially since they shape so much of our environment.”

Her last question: “So, what goes bump in the night? Me, and hopefully you, too.”

Harvard emerita professor Maria Tatar speaks on interplay of dark, light in stories

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Maria Tatar has spent decades studying folklore and mythology, implicitly and tangentially exploring the power of darkness and light in the stories we tell ourselves.

And yet, after her initial excitement over the invitation to speak for the Chautauqua Lecture Series and the theme, “After Dark: The World of Nighttime,” she had second thoughts.

“Darkness? What do I know about darkness?” she asked. “… But what I could possibly say about darkness quickly yielded to: ‘There’s way too much to say.’ ” 

Google took her to Philip Pullman, Milton, Star Wars, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Leonard Cohen, whose “Anthem,” featured in Wednesday’s ecumenical worship service, includes the phrase: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

“Darkness and light, of course, are what we live in and what we live by,” she said. “The words we speak are saturated with metaphors drawn from the realms of light and dark.”

Tatar is the John L. Loeb Research Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Folklore and Mythology, Emerita, at Harvard University, and the author of, most recently, The Heroine with 1001 Faces — a response to author Joseph Campbell’s seminal work. But it was a different author she told Chautauquans she’d be highlighting in her Wednesday, Aug. 3 lecture in the Amphitheater, which was titled “Light in the Night Kitchen” — children’s book author Maurice Sendak. A lecture on books, culture and meaning, it was a fitting conclusion to the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Class of 2022 Recognition Day Ceremony; graduates sat front and center in the Amp as guests of honor.

Before she got to Sendak, however, Tatar had to cover the nature of primal fear and the power of storytelling, the Enlightenment, and how aesthetics informed the cultural meaning of black (and Black) and white. So she started small.

Dylan Townsend / staff photographer Tatar’s lecture was titled “In the Night Kitchen,” and drew on numerous cultural touchstones, from Spike Lee to Maurice Sendak.

“For a long time, I was afraid of the dark,” Tatar said. “One night, with the help of a flashlight I swiped from my brother’s room, I made friends with the darkness. Suddenly, there was light; it was a little dim, but portals magically materialized. I found myself standing on thresholds that led to Neverland, to Narnia, to Wonderland, and to other outlandish places.”

Letters, she said, lit up her world. And they kept illuminating it.

“Letters and light banished my fear of the dark and of much else,” she said. “Reading may require candles, light bulbs, and other sources of illumination, but storytelling paradoxically, at least oral storytelling, is an art that flourishes at night and in the dark.”

Dreams let us tap into our unconsciousness, she said, evoking neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro’s Tuesday lecture. That, combined with human beings’ capacity to develop language and symbols, means we are both storytellers and interpreters.

“Anthropologists tell us many cultures forbid storytelling in the daytime, but once the sun sets, the moment comes for ‘once upon a time’ or other beginnings for stories,” she said, as she invited the audience to go back in time with her to a period when “ … nocturnal beasts are on the prowl. Mobility is limited. The labors of the day have fatigued bodies. So it’s time, then, to listen to the music and to the muses of the night.”

Man-made light, from campfires to lightbulbs, promotes activities “designed for a time when the sun disappears, when darkness descends on us,” she said. But as technology became more sophisticated, capitalist economies exploited the dark. Yet, storytelling has not disappeared. 

“Today, it’s a common practice to elevate storytelling with metaphors that reflect the social origins of the practice. We exist together in a little patch of warmth and light. … That patch of warmth and light powerfully evokes the heat and light generated by the campfires of our ancestors, and also indoor hearths of the generations that followed. In the comforts of electricity and central heating, along with the instant conveniences of smartphones, we continue to adapt storytelling, reading, … teeming with luminosity and warmth.”

Even e-readers, like Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s NOOK, have names that evoke the warm spaces where our ancestors gathered. More than warmth, universally, light — and light bulbs — serves as a metaphor for knowledge, even genius.

“Nowhere is that link between light and learning more clearly demonstrated than in our collective veneration of the Enlightenment as a source of reason and progress,” Tatar said. “This is (the period) in human history where we discovered the liberating power of knowledge, of education.” 

As a professor of Germanic languages and literature, she had to draw on Kant, and the declaration that “ ‘the enlightened are not afraid of shadows.’ Once again, cementing the superiority of light over dark and affirming how epistemology, the science of knowledge, can rarely escape the metaphorical trap inherited from those campfires that served as sites for transmitting knowledge.”

If light is the embodiment of knowledge, it is only so because of theological traditions that said what is sacred, is luminous.

“Today, what is holy?” she asked. “What’s sacred, but knowledge? Knowledge is endowed with the aura of the sacred.”

Black, darkness, is symbolic of chaos and death, of both the Furies of Greek mythology and, more recently, dark matter and black holes — which, Tatar pointed out, Stephen Hawking showed “at least the really tiny ones, are actually radiant.”

“In line with the metaphorical logic of Enlightenment philosophy, daytime is dominated by reason, legibility and clarity, while nighttime is associated with opacity, irrationality and all of these sinister forms of darkness,” she said.

This bifurcation leads into “treacherous terrain with a force field of vectors, ranging from sin and evil to the diabolical and demonic … in a more pronounced form from the 18th century onward,” Tatar said.

Black has, subsequently, become the preferred hue for the wardrobes of villains, vampires, witches and wizards, coding their evil with hints of purple or green. In Western cultures, wearing black is a signal of mourning and loss, while white is for christenings and weddings. But modern culture is “working the transvaluation machine,” Tatar said, turning a villainous trope like Maleficent from Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” into a “victim, heroine and savior, associated with the forces that were traditional light.”

Aesthetics extend beyond color theory; the use of chiaroscuro in silent films and noir cinema further bifurcated light and dark.

“The drama of light and shadow is so powerful (in these films),” Tatar said. “… What we’ve seen as a productive interplay of the two, in aesthetic terms … may appear to be skin deep, but in fact, is far more than that.”

Moving from aesthetics to ethics, Tatar came to a question that is “a profound part of our social and cultural landscape” — race and skin color in the United States.

She showed a clip of Spike Lee’s 1992 film “Malcolm X,” in which two characters have a conversation about language and the cultural binary of black and white — literally taking to the dictionary for definitions on “black” and “white,” and all the connotations involved.

Fiction writers have tried to undo that binary, Tatar noted, but change is a challenge.

“The instinctive response of some Black writers was to conceal darkness by blending in with it and becoming invisible,” she said. “It’s precisely because black is so fraught with symbolic meaning that Barbara Neely, a Black writer of murder mysteries, named her detective protagonist – in a genius stroke of deep irony — Blanche White.”

Blanche, who is Black, takes a job as a domestic worker to solve murder mysteries, using her race to blend in and not raise suspicions. It’s the same approach used in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Tatar highlighted a more recent book — Jason Mott’s twisting and bending Hell of a Book, which won the 2021 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2022 Chautauqua Prize. 

“(This character) is an author-protagonist who has a startling epiphany, a burst of human insight about how his character, Soot, could be seen at last, how he must be seen,” she said. “He also has this epiphany about how you recuperate the power of Blackness, the beauty of Blackness, while also pairing it with light, in a move that reveals their reciprocity and independence.”

The imagery Mott creates resulting from that epiphany, of light reflecting through the lens of darkness, Tatar said, shoots out “something more beautiful than I have ever seen.”

Before we ever read books like Hell of a Book, Invisible Man, The Color Purple or Barbara Neely’s murder-mysteries, we read picture books — like Goodnight Moon (she played a clip of the book being read by Christopher Walken) or Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen

“I want to take us to those books, because they are foundational,” Tatar said. “What children grow up with, that’s how they inherit these ideas about light and darkness, so we have to think carefully about what we read and think carefully about the conversations we want to have after we read those stories.”

In these stories, “darkness can be a source of existential anxiety,” she said, but also a rich place of creativity and imagination.

In the Night Kitchen explores the power of darkness to transform the anxiety bred by the dark into wonder. … This magical process is something of a myth-making process,” Tatar said. “Sendak himself emerges as the supreme mythmaker with a book that draws on the memories of materials of everyday life to construct a story that has taken on, I think, the cultural authority of a myth.”

From the Enlightenment to Spike Lee, E.O. Wilson to Leonard Cohen, aesthetics to Christopher Walken, Immanuel Kant to Maurice Sendak, Tatar tried to sum it all up: The values attached to light and dark are by no means transhistorical, or transcultural.

“The hierarchical structures that we’ve embraced can be reversed — better yet, leveled and turned into a partnership in places that darkness is valued as a source of transcendent beauty and knowledge beyond good and evil,” she said. “Our symbols are kaleidoscopic. They transform themselves with the flick of a wrist and the blink of an eye.”

Light and dark are not always at war; they can be in relationship, with symbolic power that strengthens each other, rather than diminishes.

“Instead of framing the dialectic of light and dark in terms of good/evil, innocence/sin, knowledge/ignorance, the concepts can be spring-loaded with bidirectional energy, depending on each other for richer, more productive forms of cultural energy,” she said.

Interpreting the Oracle: Neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro explores history, biology of dreams

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Everyone sleeps, which means everyone dreams — but not everyone remembers those dreams. Neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro proved this point at the outset of his lecture, when he asked his Chautauqua audience to raise their hands if, surely, they sleep every night. But when he asked how many remembered the dreams they had while asleep, only half raised their hands.

Ribeiro, whose research focuses on memory, sleep, dreams and psychedelics, is the founder of the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, and the author of The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreaming. His lecture Tuesday in the Amphitheater was part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Six theme, “After Dark: The World of Nighttime.”

We know much more about sleep than we do about dreams; humans go through four to five full cycles of sleep each night. Some, but not all, of those cycles feature dreams, and it’s the REM cycle when we dream the most, Ribeiro said. But thanks to the prevalence of electric lights, and then television screens and the internet in the palms of our hands, humans are sleeping less, which means we’re dreaming less.

“What we know is that we are sleeping about two hours less than people did 100 years ago,” Ribeiro said. “It depends on the age group. It depends on where you’re living. But overall, it basically means we are getting poorer and poorer sleep as we progress into the 21st century.”

Less sleep, essentially, means less of a chance for the REM cycle — the last cycle of sleep and dreams — to kick in. And what happens to people’s lives when they do not dream? We know that dreams are important in the history of humanity, Ribeiro said. Not just important, but essential. He traced stories from the earliest texts in Sumer, Mesopotamia and Egypt, all pointing to the centrality of dreams at the start of civilization. The Bible is filled with premonitory dreams, but they’re not limited to the Judeo-Christian tradition, Ribeiro said.

“People knew, in the antiquities, that dreams cannot be taken at face value; it’s not as if you have a dream and the dream is exactly what happens or tells you what to do, because you need to interpret dreams,” he said. “Sometimes they can be very direct, but sometimes they are very metaphorical.”

As the age of antiquities neared its end, philosophers attempted to classify dreams into two categories: A “regular dream” that references the past, and a “special dream” that refers to the future. A clear example of “special dreams” is Calpurnia, the wife of Julius Caesar, immortalized by Shakespeare, who dreamt her husband would die in a pool of blood — and her husband’s own dream.

“Caesar had a very different dream,” Ribeiro said. “He had a dream in which he would fly through the skies across the clouds and then go all the way up and meet Jupiter himself. … Jupiter greeted him warmly and said, ‘You’re now with us.’ And he felt empowered by this dream, so he didn’t pay attention to his wife, and he did go meet the senators, and we know what happened. Her dream came true in detail.”

Both dreams were premonitory, Ribeiro said, and noted he could go on for hours with examples of such dreams, from every single culture. But things started to change in the past 500 years, as “capitalism and science intertwined” first in Europe, and then everywhere Europe had influence.

“This role that dreams had to serve as some sort of insight into the future, even though it was somewhat fuzzy, somewhat noisy, somewhat needed interpretation — but nevertheless, an insight into the future — was substituted by science,” Ribeiro said. 

People didn’t need dreams and premonitions; they needed mathematics and meteorology.

“Dreams were completely neglected, and became actually complete nonsense,” he said. 

This is why we know more about sleep than we do about dreams — sleep, after all, is a “solid, scientific object.” But, Ribeiro stressed, this was only the case in Western cultures. He cited various African cultures, Indiginous communities in North America, and the Xavante people of his native  Brazil, who all understand dreams as spiritual voyages.

“For example, voyages to meet your ancestors, in which you can go and ask for council, in which you can go and ask for inspiration, for new ideas, for new names, for new songs, for new strategies,” Ribeiro said — bridging the dreams looking back with dreams looking forward, with inspiration from those dreams having real-world impacts.

The Xavante were combating occupation efforts by the Portuguese and then Brazilian governments during the 19th and early 20th century; in the 1940s an Xavante elder had a dream.

“We cannot fight the white man,” the man advised, based on his dream. “We need to make peace with them. We need to become friends with them.”

So the Xavante shifted their strategy, Ribeiro said, and they are now among the strongest Native people in Brazil because of it.

Beyond the artistic, metaphysical and historical influences of dreams, Ribeiro said science itself owes inspiring breakthroughs to the phenomenon — from chemistry to the periodic table of elements. 

“It’s interesting to see that even though science didn’t have a place for dreams for a long period of time, dreams always had a place for science,” he said. “They were always helping science throughout.”

After all of this, Ribeiro asked, could there be a plausible, evolutionary narrative to make sense of dreams? Dreams — at least at this point in our understanding of physics, he said — can’t actually predict the future. 

“Therefore, we need to come up with — if not a new physical explanation for things — we need to come up with some biological explanation,” he said, and maybe then some sense can be made of dreams.

Going back 4 billion years, to the beginning of life on earth, all biological organisms have a circadian rhythm — from the ones with just a single cell, to humans.  

“This means that this alteration of day and night is perhaps the most prevalent selective pressure, which means that all forms of life had to adapt to this,” he said. “They could not go against it. They had to go with it.”

This is true from jellyfish to humans — and all animals experience what is called “quiet sleep.” But there’s another kind of sleep, called active sleep, otherwise known as the REM cycle. Research has shown that even flies might experience active sleep; Ribeiro’s own lab has proven that octopus do. But those REM cycles are short, very short, compared to that of humans, whose cycles last 40-50 minutes. (The REM cycle for a platypus, however, is more than an hour.)

At the beginning of mammalian evolution, Ribeiro said, the focus was on survival. So the notion that dreams somehow predict the future likely evolved during the period in which all cognitive powers were dedicated to surviving. It has to do with memory reactivation, he said, and when we sleep, that’s exactly what happens.

“Threat simulation theory  says dreams evolved as a way to warn our ancestors about impending threats,” Ribeiro said. “By reactivating memories of those threats, this allowed us, our ancestors, to prepare for the future. … Whatever is happening to you now has direct consequences for tomorrow. And if you dream about that, you are simulating outcomes.” 

So the Oracle of Night evolved under harsh, but simple conditions — kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. But in the modern world, “when you have thousands of little problems, the dreams reflect that. And they often don’t make sense as a whole.”

As history progresses, and as humans evolve, we begin to share our dreams.

“If mammals are the animals that have the most dreaming, we are the only animals, as far as we know, that can share our dreams,” Ribeiro said. “I also have a little bit of suspicion that this may not be true. … (But) what we know is we can do it. And there’s no reason to believe that our ancestors 300,000 years ago were not doing this. Very likely, they were getting together and sharing their dreams around the fire.”

This is what truly, as far as we know, sets us apart from other mammals. A pet dog may always know to expect their human home at 6 p.m., but only humans can close their eyes — Ribeiro had the audience try this — and picture their best friend from the age of 5, to immediately picturing their plans for Thanksgiving.

“We can travel within our memories towards the past, towards the future. We can come up with stuff that never existed, and this is so easy that we can still do this as we talk to people and drive a car somewhere,” he said.

This is because the same parts of the human brain responsible for dreams are responsible for daydreams; so, as prehistoric humans developed stronger relationships among their families and communities, and the concept of death and loss developed as well, dreams took on a new meaning.

“Imagine back in the Paleolithic era,” he said, “(and you dream of a dead relative). This can only be interpreted as evidence of that person being alive. And many people have proposed … this was the beginning of the belief in gods.”

Science shows that sleep is when the brain detoxifies and heals, improving cognition and ridding the organ of malformed proteins. But it’s only been in the last 12 years that science has been able to show that dreaming is beneficial for a person’s cognition. And this delay in science, and the fact that both sleep and dreaming have been neglected in Western culture, has “tremendous impacts at the ideological, social levels,” Ribeiro said.

“When you sleep poorly and dream poorly, you get all sorts of problems the next day,” he said. “You have cognitive problems; you can’t remember what you know. You can’t learn new things. You have bad emotional regulation. You become cranky, grumpy, difficult to deal with, and this is like a social snowball.”

Down the road, a lack of sleep and restorative dreams can lead to diabetes, depression, cardiovascular disease and, eventually, Alzheimer’s disease.

“We know that we have a problem in the world,” Ribeiro said. “There’s more people dying from suicide than homicides. People are feeling despair. People are feeling disconnected. Depression is rampant, even in countries that are developed and rich.”

There have been endless technological advancements, Ribeiro noted, but humans can’t solve starvation, or pollution, let alone contemplate the universe. He argued that this paradox may be linked to humanity’s abandonment of sleep and dreams.

“If we knew how to sleep and dream properly and to use those dreams, to share our desires and fears, could we be more empathetic? Could we be more resourceful? Could we be more creative? Could we be more intelligent and understand that the problems that our ancestors had are solved?” he said. “… If we’re just able to increase our ability to love and to decrease our ability to compete, we may actually survive ourselves.”

Jim Richardson discusses light pollution, human connection to night sky

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Photos of cacti with a backdrop of a brilliant blue, a starry sky contrasted against aerial photos of nighttime Chicago sliced into a grid by streetlights — these are some of the images displayed by National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson on Monday, Aug. 1 to the Amphitheater audience at the first 10:45 a.m. lecture of Week Six “After Dark: The World of Nighttime.”

His lecture, titled “Vanishing Night,” focused on light pollution and the Milky Way. Richardson opened his discussion with the places and projects his job as a photographer has led him to.

In order to demonstrate his approach to photography, Richardson showed a photo of soil erosion on the Shaanxi Plateau in China. While the photo had little to do with the decreasing visibility of the Milky Way, it helped demonstrate his overall point.

Richardson photographed the Shaanxi Plateau because it has some of the worst soil erosion in the world, but when he asked the farmers working on their field, they said they did not have a problem with soil erosion.

“It’s crept up on them. It’s not that they can’t see it, but that they don’t know what they are seeing,” Richardson said.

He believes this is where a photographer can shed light.

Georgia Pressley / staff photographer Jim Richardson, photographer for National Geographic, speaks Monday in the Amphitheater. Richardson’s talk, opening the Week Six theme of “After Dark: The World of Nighttime,” was titled “The End of Night.”

“I’m in the seeing business, but I’m also in the knowing business,” he said.

A combination of facts and images drove Richardson’s lecture. While he admitted he is not a scientist, he has a bit of expertise on the disappearing night sky because he spent time photographing the subject for National Geographic.

Camera technology is at a point where photographers can showcase light pollution and the night sky, he said. So, with NatGeo, Richardson went to the Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah. This location was chosen for a specific reason.

“It was the first of the dark sky parks in the world. And it really is magnificent,” he said. “There is a scale for this stuff, the Bortle scale.” 

The Bortle scale in one of the darkest skies in the world will show “such darkness that the Milky Way will cast a visible shadow.”

With the help of a park ranger to light up the underside of a natural rock bridge, Richardson took his first series of dark sky photos, capturing the brownish red rock bridge against the night sky speckled with white.

The photo taken there became the lead picture of the NatGeo cover story, “Our Vanishing Night,” which was published in November 2008.

“I was convinced that what we first had to understand was not the problem, but the loss of the splendor; the loss of the night sky; the loss of what has been, throughout our humanity, this wonderful heritage, this constant companion, this wonderful, wonderful place — our galaxy — and we live out there,” he said.

Richardson shared that when it is truly dark out and the Milky Way is visible, looking at the southern end of the galaxy, toward the center, is where the black hole of our galaxy is.

“That big super massive black hole that drives all of this, that emits these gravity waves that cause the crest of the waves of star formation — it’s a marvelous process, and we are not just inhabitants of it,” he said. “We’re part of that process. It’s an incredible thing.”

Richardson then shifted the audience’s focus to how the Earth looks from space, with bright splatters of light pollution across the globe, specifically in areas like the Eastern United States, Western Europe and India.

He explained that this radical shift in how our world looks from space has occurred in just over 140 years since Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. This portion of time is relatively small, and these changes happened quite rapidly.

“To a large degree, it’s a population map, isn’t it?” Richardson asked. “Except, conspicuously, from Africa. Because, not only is it a map of population, it’s a map of GDP — gross domestic product. Curiously, it’s also a map of paved roads. You have more light pollution where you have more paved roads.”

During Richardson’s photographic journey for this night sky project, he traveled to Burkina Faso in West Africa. There, he photographed people around a campfire with the vibrant night sky above them.

“For much of our existence here on planet Earth, this was our world. This was our world, you know? Sitting around the fire at night, the stories going back and forth, stories being projected onto the planets, stories being projected onto the constellations,” he said. “(The sky was) our constant partner, part of our heritage, how we think, how we react, how we commune with our families and our clans and all of that — that wonder that we feel when we sit there and look up at a pristine, beautiful night sky and contemplate the universe.”

He accompanied this with a photo of a man in Tanzania sitting on the ground and gazing up at the sky.

Richardson said people were created from stars, and if light pollution causes the connection to be lost between people and the night sky, the connection to our beginning is also lost. 

“All the atoms in our bodies formed within the hearts of stars,” he said. “It’s the only place you can make complex atoms. So, we are not just the observers. We are the participants in this great journey. And I think it’s worthwhile for us to consider with our knowledge, with what we know, how we think about the night.”

Richardson said that of the children born today, 80% will never see the Milky Way.

Light pollution is particularly rampant in cities, he explained, showing pictures of Central Park in New York City lit up at night, as well as photos of Denver and Chicago — the latter of which became the cover of the National Geographic issue that featured Richardson’s photos of the disappearing night sky. 

In some places, the lights are so bright at night that they have earned the term “sky glow.” When Richardson photographed the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the lights shining up at the arch were so bright they cast a shadow from the arch onto the clouds overhead.

Cities are not the only places that have a light pollution problem, Richardson pointed out, pulling up photos of Liberal, Kansas, which has a population of less than 20,000.

“You get this sense of light trespass,” he said.

Richardson addressed the question of light pollution’s definition and effect by listing the tangible issues of light pollution. To begin, he said, it disrupts the circadian rhythms of humans, suppresses the production of melatonin, and has even been found to cause breast cancer.

His example of this was his photo of a taxi’s rearview mirror, showing the reflection of the tired eyes of a man.

“It looks pretty much like that,” Richardson said. “Harder to see. Harder for me to photograph, but that one kind of got to it.”

The impacts on nature are also significant. He gave examples of how migratory patterns of birds, the eating patterns of bats, and firefly mating are disrupted because of light pollution.

Tall buildings with bright lights frequently cause birds to fly into them and, subsequently, die. Toronto resident, Brian Armstrong, noticed an injured bird and now patrols the streets of Toronto to try to save the birds that have mistakenly flown into the buildings.

The birds he can’t save, he collects for the Fatal Light Awareness Program, which creates a display of all the birds that died flying into buildings.

“It was one of the most profoundly affecting things I saw,” Richardson said. “All these birds, lying out there.”

Light pollution also leads to the death of the loggerhead turtles, which frequently breed in Juno Beach, Florida. The endangered turtles return to within 100 yards of where they were born to lay their own eggs.

“Often they come back to nest, to find that somebody has built a new house or a new high-rise tower that’s all lit up,” Richardson said.

This is not where the disruption ends. Once the loggerhead eggs hatch, Richardson explained, they are confused by the lights and head toward them rather than toward the ocean where they can swim away. When they move to the light, they often find themselves on highways where they could be run over by cars.

Even with all of the effects on nature, Richardson believes the light pollution problem is not unsolvable.

“There’s one big cure: Turn the lights down,” he said. “We can do all the technological things we want. But essentially, we have to figure out a way to live with the lights turned down a little bit.”

To experience a town where all the lights were truly turned off, Richardson returned home to Cuba, Kansas. On the Amp’s screens, he contrasted two photos: the first with the streetlights on and the second with all the lights off. The difference was not only visible in the sky, but in all the people gazing up at the stars.

Richardson also gave the example of Harmony, Florida, which is part of the International Dark Sky Association.

“They use these lamp shades in which no light goes up, and light goes down where you want it — where you’re walking at night,” he said. “But, you notice the houses back there? It’s not even lighting up the tops of the houses. So, light where you want it.”

Another photo Richardson took in Harmony has herons in the foreground and large homes in the background.

“What it means is the sandhill cranes can coexist with very nice housing,” he said. “That’s an impressive thing to me, that it’s not necessarily an either/or kind of situation.”

The International Dark Sky Association has also worked to create 195 dark sky parks, Richardson shared, from New Zealand to the United Kingdom, and even with many in the United States.

He finished his lecture with a call to action.

“I’ll also implore you that when the next zoning commission comes up in your town, when people are discussing street lighting or new developments or anything like this, you go,” Richardson said. “You go and raise your voice at some level to make intelligent decisions about how we can live morally in a world of limits and be happy doing it.”

From doom, gloom to hope: Lee Drutman outlines potential of multi-party system

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Lee Drutman’s closing lecture of the Week Five Chautauqua Lecture Series theme on “The Vote and Democracy” was titled “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop.” And so he offered the audience “a little doom, a little gloom,” but “mostly a note of hope and a sense of possibility, because I do think our democracy can renew and innovate.”

In fact, America could be on the verge of that renewal and innovation, precisely because it’s in a doom-and-gloom moment, Drutman said. Drutman is a political scientist and advocate for both ranked-choice voting in the United States, and a multi-party system: the idea that the country needs strong third, fourth, or even fifth parties on the ballots. He’s a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America, and the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multi-Party Democracy in America. 

He spoke Friday, July 29, in the Amphitheater, sharing his “big idea” for representative democracy. Within his big idea is four takeaways that he shared with Chautauqua. 

“First, I want to convince you that though there are many problems, at the core is the hyperpolarized two-party system that keeps us divided and angry, and the winner-take-all electoral system that supports and preserves this hyperpolarized two-party system,” he said.

Dave munch / photo editor Drutman’s lecture closed the Chautauqua Lecture Series’ Week Five theme of “The Vote and Democracy.”

Second, he wanted to convince his audience that, among proposed solutions, the one with the highest chance of success is this move to a proportional, multi-party democracy. And it doesn’t require a constitutional amendment — “just ordinary legislation.” 

“Third, I want to convince you that reform is indeed possible, and that we are in a moment in which big things are possible,” Drutman said.

Finally, he wanted to hammer home that this reform isn’t just possible, but urgent and necessary.

“American democracy has had a long history, and it’s a history of ups and downs,” he said. “… We’ve done this before, and in each era, there’s a pattern of deep dissatisfaction with the unfairness and corruption of existing rules that gave way to periods of reinvention and reinvigoration. … The fundamental bargain of American democracy adapted to changing societal values and moral expectations about how modern democracy ought to live up to its core values.”

Eras of reform — the Revolutionary War, the expansion of the franchise in the 1830s, the progressive era of the early 1900s, to the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Movement — happen about every 60 years. So, Drutman said, we’re right on schedule in 2022.

“But the question is, can we do it again?” he asked. “And can we learn from the mistakes of the past, or are we doomed?”

Drutman took the Amp back to the last era of reinvention in America — the 1960s.

 “Most politics was local,” he said. “National parties were more like these loose labels whose main function was really to come together every four years to say who should run for president. … There’s a famous quip from President Eisenhower in 1950: ‘There’s not one Republican Party. There’s 48 Republican Parties.’ ”

At the time, there were 48 states. The same quip could apply to the Democratic Party then, too. The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement shifted political relationships, and for a moment in the 1970s, Drutman said, people thought the era of partisan politics was over. 

But “beneath the surface, what was happening was that the parties were realigning,” he said. “… And the focus of Washington was shifting. Washington was becoming the arbiter of cultural values as these issues really came to the center of politics, … and parties became more nationalized.”

Citizens were no longer voting for candidates, but for the parties. As local media declined in the 1990s, more attention focused on national politics, and elections — even local elections — became referendums on national issues. 

Those years of shifting political relationships, from the 1960s to the 1980s, meant that in those years, American politics “really operated more like a four-party system, with liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, along with conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats,” Drutman said.

But as parties drew clearer lines on social and cultural issues, those liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats began to disappear. Geography has something to do with it, tied to diversity, as America becomes more multicultural and multiethnic, Drutman said. It became easier to see the other party and “distant and different, and things that are distant and different become more scary, more threatening. The more the other side becomes a threat, the worse it would be if they won.”

That fear just feeds more fear, with harder fights and higher stakes. 

“Yet for all the fighting and the fear that the other side is going to take over and do some horrible thing, the other side never seems to amass quite enough power to actually do all that much for all that long,” Drutman said. “Instead, what we’ve had over the last 30 years is this constant swing, back and forth. … Stakes keep rising. Scorched-earth policy, scorched-earth rhetoric keeps rising. No compromises. Gridlock.”

This, he said, is the two-party doom loop.

“Yes, it’s true — we’ve had Democrats and Republicans for 160 years now, but something is fundamentally different today,” Drutman said. For one, politics are more nationalized than ever, and the two prominent parties are “completely, geographically, non-overlapping parties.”

Americans’ political conflicts have been flattened, with Democrats and Republicans “separated by geography, culture, identity and, most dangerous of all, different facts. Just fundamentally different realities.”

The Founding Fathers knew their history, Drutman said, and they knew that the few democracies and republics that had existed before America had fallen into civil wars. 

“They thought they had worked out this solution, which was this complex system of shared powers and checks and balances,” he said. “… Madison lays out in Federalist Paper No. 10 this idea that coalitions should be fluid. There’s going to be factions. … But you can prevent tyranny and dominance and this binary by trying to make it harder for the factions to be consistent.”

The alternative to politics without parties, however, is “incoherent chaos,” he said, and ultimately a descent into authoritarianism.

Having laid out the problem, he moved to the solution — a multi-party democracy. There are other counterarguments and ideas, Drutman noted, but his proposition is to change the way Americans vote, getting rid of single-member districts which limit choices to the two parties. 

He proposed proportional, multi-member districts, with up to five elected representatives per district, allocated proportionally. Around the world, in most democratic countries, “it’s a norm, frankly. … The U.S. is really the only large democracy that has two political parties.”

Drutman is not proposing what Israel does, for example, with the whole country as one electoral district. But there’s a sweet spot, of those five-member districts, that he thinks would pair nicely with increasing the size of the House of Representatives.

This system could do more than just solve the binary, zero-sum game the U.S. finds itself in; it could also alleviate the power of gerrymandering, which he said could mean “every vote matters equally.” And with more parties and more options, he said, voter turnout is higher among those who don’t align with either of the two major parties.

“There’s some good, decent people who would like to have a party that is conservative, but not anti-democracy,” Drutman said. “But without a multi-party system, where is that party going to come from? And that party is essential to the future of our democracy.”

Change happens slowly, and then all at once; he reminded the audience that many ideas have been fringe ideas in the history of American politics, and now is “a moment of transformation.”

“We’ve got to figure out how to build something new, that takes the best principles of American democracy and updates them for our modern era,” Drutman said. “Now, obviously changing how we vote is a big idea. And it’s really challenging to build new parties in our political system. … We’ve had a history of third parties that have failed because it’s really hard in a single-winner district (and) two-party system.”

There are promising steps being taken in the short-term, however. New York State has used fusion balloting, for example, allowing multiple ballot lines to endorse the same candidate.

“History doesn’t move in straight lines. History moves in waves. And the moments in which everybody’s feeling dark and pessimistic are the moments in which big ideas can take off,” Drutman said. “ … In these moments, somebody has to have a plan. Somebody has to have a vision. This is why it’s so important to have a vision for the future — any destruction to the status quo is going to feel risky, but whether we like it or not, it’s happening. It’s being done; it’s just a question of how, by whom, and with what goals in mind?”

That two-party doom loop he mentioned at the outset of his lecture “isn’t going to break on its own.”

“Democracy is a fragile system. … But I am seeing some energy that says we need bigger, more transformative change out there,” Drutman said. “The status quo is broken and we need to mobilize and organize. … Most progress always come when enough of us look at the world as it is and say, ‘enough already.’ ”

Americans are not “sleepwalkers fated for disaster,” he noted, because their political pessimism has done something important.

“It’s awakened us to where we might be headed if we don’t make big changes,” he said. “And the good news is that we’re here. We’re having this conversation. To me, this is a cause for optimism, and it’s a moment for leadership to take us out of the ravine. So enough with the pessimism. Let’s turn this mess around.”

Michael Li discusses gerrymandering, ‘thinking outside of the box’ in America

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Where the United States draws the line in election law has never been more important to the preservation of democracy — especially when it comes to representation, which Michael Li said is “the cornerstone of democracy.”

Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, tackled the multidimensional issue of gerrymandering Thursday, July 28, in the Amphitheater, discussing how redistricting has impacted politics and how it will continue to change in the future. His lecture was titled “The Fight Against Gerrymandering: How Are We Doing?” 

Li practiced law at Baker Botts in Dallas for 10 years before joining the Brennan Center, where he specializes in voter rights and redistricting. Author of a widely cited blog on redistricting, Li is a regular commentator on election law and has appeared on MSNBC, NPR and “PBS NewsHour.”  He has also written for publications like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and USA Today

As the fourth Chautauqua Lecture Series speaker for Week Five’s theme “The Vote and Democracy,” Li opened his lecture by drawing on a conversation he had with Tuesday’s 10:45 a.m. speaker Linda Chavez, chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity. 

On the front porch of the guest house on the grounds, Li asked Chavez if she was pessimistic or optimistic about the future of the United States, given the political and social strife afflicting the country — she responded that she was “worried.”

Li asked the audience the same question before telling them that his talk would offer both a hopeful and daunting perspective on voter rights.

He launched into his discussion of gerrymandering by reciting Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion on the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

“He says, ‘Women are not without electoral or political power. It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so,’ ” Li said. “Now, there’s a lot that’s wrong with those statements. … At the heart of it is the idea that if you don’t like the laws that are passed by lawmakers, just vote them out.”

Alito’s insinuation that the people of the U.S. can choose what happens in their country, however, discounts the injustices gerrymandering has in creating a majority unreflective of the actual population.

In reading Alito’s opinion, Li thought of his home state Texas, which, in 2021, redrew maps that allowed Republicans to win the majority with only 44% of the vote, while Democrats had 56%. 

“That, in short, is not what democracy looks like,” Li said “… There is no more vivid illustration of why what Justice Alito says will work, won’t.”

In 2019, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to make partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional in Rucho v. Common Cause; but, the Court tabled the question. 

“They said it is a political question that we are not going to decide,” Li said. “When it did that, it has opened the door to partisan gerrymandering around the country, because now, as long as you can claim that you’re doing it for political purposes, even if it’s to target an opponent, even if it’s to benefit yourself, even if it is to benefit your party, that’s OK.”

The Rucho decision made not only a statement on politics, but on discrimination.

“The Supreme Court’s decision in Rucho has opened the door not only to political discrimination,” Li said, “but also to racial discrimination, if the courts are not willing to dig deeply and try to separate out when the motive is racial and when it is political.”

Li connected the 2019 decision to the American Revolution and struggle for representation in British Parliament. 

“Representation is important, and it’s important that the bodies that make our laws and decisions for us should look like us,” Li said. “That just doesn’t happen if you put the thumb on the scale in the way that has happened in recent years.”

To understand this imbalance, and redistricting in its entirety, Li briefed the audience on the dynamics of national politics in the last decade. 

The first aspect he highlighted was that the rate of population growth is the slowest it has been since the Great Depression, climbing only 7.4% in the last decade. That growth is most prevalent in the South and the West, home to 40% of all Americans. 

Population growth, in combination with racial demographics, affects redistricting.

The population growth of Black Americans increased by 2.5 million people in the last 10 years, and the South specifically has witnessed this growth with two-thirds of that increase living in the South. The South’s growth also increased with half of all immigrants who have come to the U.S. in the last year settling there.

Another facet of national, racial demographics Li touched on was that for the first time in the last decade, the white population in the United States fell. 

“This is a major driver of a lot of what is happening both in redistricting and in terms of our country’s politics,” Li said. “There’s no question that demographic anxiety lies at the heart of a lot of what I’m going to talk about today.”

The last piece of Li’s briefing discussed the people who draw the maps themselves. In 2011, Republicans controlled 187 congressional seats, as opposed to Democrats’ 75 seats. Republicans “maximized their advantages” and made it hard for Democrats to win back control. 

“Had Donald Trump not been elected and had there not been sort of the suburban shifts that followed his election, it’s likely that the House would have remained Republican all of last decade,” Li said. 

Having “set the table” for the discussion on gerrymandering, Li went on to define redistricting through the lens of seven specific examples. 

First, he said that Democrats did fairly well in the last decade, now on a path to the majority in future years. In 2020, President Joe Biden won 197 Democratic seats by more than 8 points and won 30 seats by less than 8 points. 

“Democrats drew maps in a way that suggests that they thought that the Biden coalition of recent years — the coalition of women and younger voters and voters of color and suburban, college-educated women — would hold together, largely,” Li said. “That’s a very optimistic version of the country. Republicans didn’t — so Democrats drew seats that were a lot more like 54%, 53%. This is good enough for us. Republicans drew seats that were a little bit safer than that.” 

The maps, however, are still “wildly skewed,” which was Li’s second point. In the last decade, nine states had maps initially passed at the legislature that were considered significant partisan gerrymanders.  

The third: Competitive districts are disappearing. Li again pointed to Texas to illustrate this phenomenon. 

“It used to be in Texas that Republicans won, or Donald Trump won 11 districts by 15 or more points,” Li said. “After redistricting, he wins 21, so it almost doubles. Republicans only have 24 seats in Texas. 21 out of the 24 seats they have are super-safe districts that Donald Trump won by 15 or more points, and that provides a lot of insurance — both against demographic change and political shifts.”

Denton County, Texas, further demonstrates this shift. Situated in the 26th congressional district, Denton County is home to a high-tech industry and college-educated women who are typically left-leaning. The area was sectioned off to join a district with the Texas panhandle, 700 miles away. This maneuver joined the rural suburbs of Texas with an urban area in contoured ways to control majority vote.

“If you’re scared of both people of color and of college-educated white women, there’s only so much you can do, and you have to end up doing something like this,” Li said, motioning to the gerrymandered map of Denton above him.  

On a more positive note, the fourth example offered hope for the future, and lies in state courts. This decade, state courts in New York, Maryland, North Carolina and Ohio have struck down gerrymanders. 

“Increasingly, people are looking to state courts and to state constitutions as a possible remedy for gerrymandering,” Li said. “I think that state courts are oftentimes ignored in vain and state constitutions are ignored in vain. … There’s a rich state constitutional tradition … to focus only on federal courts, and that’s really not where all the action is at.”

With the rising power of the state courts comes a counterattack. For example, Republicans wanted to impeach Maureen O’Conner, a Republican Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, after she struck down partisan gerrymanders.  

“State courts are playing a bigger role, but there’s also push back from state courts,” Li said. “Also, watch for judicial elections in lots of these states to be highly, highly polarized going forward.” 

 Li also brought up the independent state legislature theory, which asserts that only Congress can override a state law relating to federal courts or redistricting, not the state itself. When this doctrine — or theory, depending on who one asks — was raised after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the state’s congressional map in 2018, the case was taken to the Supreme Court. Alito immediately denied it. 

The general attitude toward the theory is now changing. 

“Flash forward just four years, and you have a majority of the court deciding to hear a case out of North Carolina, deciding whether the North Carolina Supreme Court has the power to strike down a congressional map for violating the North Carolina Constitution,” Li said. “At least four justices agreed to hear that case, and there seems to be a path to a majority, and that’s really worrying because state courts are jumping into the equation, and now the U.S. Supreme Court could take them out.”

Li then moved to discuss the sixth example, redistricting reforms and their successes and limitations, by talking about the stark differences in Michigan and Ohio. 

In 2016, volunteers in Michigan created an independent commission aimed to eliminate gerrymandering. The commission received half a million signatures and passed with 60% of the blue vote. Michigan, which was previously one of the worst gerrymandered states in the country, is now among the least gerrymandered states. 

By contrast, Ohio adopted a reform that left line drawing in the hands of the elected officials. 

“While courts in Ohio can strike down a map, they can’t put in place a new map,” Li said. “They can only send it back to the people who drew the last gerrymandered map and say, ‘Fix this.’ You would think the Court telling you to fix this would cause you to fix it. That has not happened in Ohio, either at the congressional level or the legislative level.” 

The seventh and last point Li included was that above all, gerrymandering creates a disappointing cycle for people of color. 

“There is some good news for our communities of color in electoral politics around the country, which sometimes I don’t think we do enough to acknowledge,” Li said. “That is, that people of color are increasingly winning in districts where the minority share of the population is not particularly high.”

Alabama is a state with prevalent racial discrimination drawn into the electoral districts. Li said that there is only one district in which Black voters enjoy political success, and the rest ignore the “Black belt” of voters at the bottom of the state. 

“You see the band of Black voters stretching across Alabama? That’s the Black belt,” Li said, pointing to his slides. “That is the old cotton belt of Alabama that has hundreds of years of shared history, common challenges, common needs. In a lot of ways, the idea that the Black belt is divided up among four different districts is crazy, because everybody agrees what the Black belt is. Everybody understands that it has a shared history that stretches back, again, hundreds and hundreds of years.”

Li said that as gerrymandering persists, the effective use of the Voting Rights Act dwindles. 

“I think really the challenge for us is going to be, increasingly with this Court, to think outside the box, and to think about other alternatives,” Li said. “ … There’s never really been a successful multi-racial democracy where there isn’t a dominant group, and that’s a challenge for us. How do we do that? I think it’s important for us to be prepared to think outside the box, because that is a very dark place that we are in.”

To conclude his lecture, Li noted that the original First Amendment the founders drafted would have created a Congress different from what was actually made, one with far more seats and members. Li discussed this original amendment as a way to say that “we should not, at this moment, be afraid to think outside the box.”

“It is easy to curl up in a ball sometimes and think all is lost,” Li said. “But at this moment, we should be brave like the founding generation was and we should, in the words of Scripture, ‘fear not,’ because if we’re going to keep our country, it’s up to us to redefine it. Every generation gets to define anew, and that is our challenge, our task.”

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