For the next 90 minutes Harris led the conversation on politics, science, ethics and God.  When the time came for audience questions the queues for the audience microphones stretched to the back of the hall.  The few questioners who did get a chance to ask something showed themselves to be part of a bunch of unusually cerebral people who were not only cool and diverse but clearly deeply engaged with their times.  It was the sort of crowd any politician would dream of being able to attract, while very few mainstream media figures would even be able to fill the bar of such a venue (people might come for the celebrity but they would not be detained by the thoughts).  Afterwards people mulled around, talking ideas, taking photos and finally getting those drinks in.  In some ways it was like a rock concert, but a rock concert of ideas.  For his followers, Harris is indeed a type of rock-star.

He first came to prominence in the post-9/11 years, firstly through his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. The book was an instant bestseller and was bracketed with a set of other ‘anti-God’ books that came out around the same time (not least Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great).  He became identified along with them as one of the ‘new atheists’ and along with the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett they all became known as the ‘four horsemen’ of the anti-theist movement of the 2000s.

For those who were paying attention it was obvious even from The End of Faith that Harris’s contributions did not simply consist of arguing around an absence.  The most controversial and brave parts of that book were not those aspects which reiterated in a newer and more sparkling form arguments against God which had existed before, but crucial arguments about what this meant for the moral universe the world now found itself in.  What should the attitude of non-believers be in an era of mass-terror being committed in the name of faith?  What accommodations could we (or should we) all come to agree upon?  In his writings throughout the rest of that decade – not least in his crystalline Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) Harris remained focussed on this question.  Not least because world events kept calling him back to the subject he had broken through in.  Throughout events like the Mohammed cartoon crisis (2005 – ?) Harris proved to be one of the few people who had a certain enough moral framework, a developed enough understanding of what was being attempted and enough residual outrage to make a stand against such violent incursions of the most extreme forms of faith back into the public square.

It led him to be pigeon-holed, certainly.  But by the turn of the decade it became clear that his strong anti-theism was not all there was to him (enough though that could have been).  In The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values (2010) and Waking Up: A guide to Spirituality without Religion (2014) he did what very few among the ‘new atheists’ had ever bothered to do.  He attempted to build a positive case in the terrain which the new atheists had scorched.  Unlike many in his own schools of thought he recognised that opposition was not enough, but that it was necessary to build and to address questions, rather than merely to savage them and shoot them down.  What he engaged in was not what was elsewhere described as ‘Atheism 2.0’ but atheism as a starting point for all the important subjects which still followed.

Of course individual readers will have individual reactions to the level of success or persuasiveness of these ventures.  But the sincerity of them, as well as the depth – and, perhaps most crucially – width of his learning is something which any honest critic as well as fan will note.  His works draw not just on philosophy and history but on the very latest developments on science, in particular neuroscience.

Perhaps it is this cutting-edge that allows the ‘Waking Up’ podcast which Harris began in 2013 to reach tens of millions of listeners around the world.  In these podcasts – a medium in which Harris was a relative pioneer – he mulls at length (sometimes for several hours) on the most serious themes.

He occasionally veers wholly into politics.  But more commonly he delves into issues deep beneath the events of any day’s news.  Recent podcasts have addressed ‘Consciousness and the self’ (a conversation with the professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Anil K. Seth) and a conversation on ‘The science of meditation’.

These podcasts are an extraordinary phenomenon.  With more than a million followers on Twitter, Harris is obviously able to point people to the irregularly posted discussions.  But what is most extraordinary – as audiences like that in London in October evidenced – is their reach.  Not just because they are listened to by millions of people at a time.  But because in their reach they demonstrate the failure of a popular broadcast media intent on ‘gotcha’ moments and ‘X annihilates Y’ screen-grabs.

Harris shows an entirely different model of how to engage with your time and its challenges.  Even with people who he has invited on with whom he disagrees he shows himself to be unfailingly, outstandingly courteous.  Without any grandstanding he demonstrates continuously that thoughtful dialogue remains possible even between people who fundamentally disagree.  When he crossed swords with the actor Ben Affleck on the Bill Maher show in the USA four years ago Affleck came across as a grand-standing ignoramus with a misplaced, Hollywood-induced, sense of his own significance.  Even as he rolled his finger and ordered his fellow guest to hurry things along (as though Affleck were the director of all situations he graces with his presence) Harris dealt with him courteously, carefully and – as audience reaction showed – devastatingly.

It is the same in the conversations which he hosts.  It is impossible to come away feeling that Harris has done anything other than give his guest their best shot.  A recent appearance by Harris on Russell Brand’s podcast exemplified the idea.  Brand showed off his wares in his familiar fashion (duck, weave, play the joker, turn into a pseudo-philosopher, then whoopsey-daisey there I go again, I’m a comic really etc, ad nauseum).  All the time Harris takes even what Brand says as a serious proposition, countering him and correcting him, but always with a courtesy and an attention to facts so fastidious that it makes you wonder whether it mightn’t at some point even make some impact of Brand. In an age of intellectual dishonesty Harris’s way of communicating face-to-face as well as with his readers betrays a commitment to honesty as well as honest dialogue which is unusual.  Of course it might yet prove essential.

Harris is still only 50.  Many television bookers will not have read his works. Quite a number of opinion-page editors will only vaguely have registered him.  But he is one of the free minds who is changing our world.  And he’ll keep doing that whether the old media notice what he’s doing or not.

Seven-foot Dirk, drafted by the Mavs in 1998, is one of only seven players ever to have played 20 seasons in the NBA, and one of only two to have done so with a single team (Kobe Bryant is the second, in case you were wondering). His loyalty and longevity alone make him stand out. So too do his stats: he’s scored more than 30,000 points, making him the 6^th all-time highest scorer; he’s a 13-time “all-star”; an NBA champion; and in 15 of his 19 full seasons has led the Mavs into the playoffs. That makes him a great of the game. But it is his unorthodox style that makes him a true maverick, because over the course of those two decades, Nowitzki has changed how basketball is played.

Firstly, “big men”, as the tallest players are known, weren’t supposed to shoot long-balls, and certainly not 3-pointers. Dirk changed that. Nor were they supposed to have the versatility and ball-handling skills to drive to the basket, or stretch the floor. Which helps explain why defensive player after defensive player have dubbed Dirk “unguardable”.

Dirk didn’t just slot in to the game – despite his poor English, and the evident shock of joining a league whose quality was incomparable to anything he had experienced – he revolutionised it, and has spawned copycat after copycat.

Nate Scott, writing for Fox Sports last year said “if you look at the modern game, it’s hard to think of anyone more influential than Nowitzki.” The Wall Street Journal dedicated 1,000-plus words to his iconic “fade away” shot, or what they refer to as “The Most-Stolen Move in the NBA”. Dirk’s unorthodox moves were the result of equally unorthodox training regimes, devised by his eccentric German mentor and shooting coach Holger Geschwindner – and a lot of training hours (he’s famed for his superhuman work ethic).

It’s that willingness to rip up the rule book, to do things differently that makes Dirk the basketball equivalent of the “free minds” UnHerd has profiled. He’s my wild card offering because he shares many of the characteristics that link our current line-up: refusal to fit the mould, determination to forge a unique path, an unorthodox approach, and an unwavering commitment to winning (in his case the game, rather than an argument). The Dunking Deutschman is a shoo-in for the basketball Hall of Fame.  But as an #MFFL, I’d rather get a 21^st season.

Jane Jacobs was the epitome of a free mind: self-taught, polymathic, anti-ideological, observational, original and perpetually ahead of her time.

One of most influential Americans of the 20th century, she challenged and then transformed the practice of urban planning despite having no formal qualifications in the field (or rather because she didn’t).

She is best known for two things. The first was her successful campaign to stop the ten-lane Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have wrecked one the greatest cityscapes in the world. The second was to write The Death and Life of Great American Cities a remarkable book that revolutionised our understanding of how cities – and, by extension, entire economies – actually work. Many of her ideas like ‘social capital’ and ‘eyes on the street’ are now so commonplace that we forget where they came from. But they were hers – and she developed them not through abstract theory, but by observing her beloved Manhattan and everything that engendered its commercial and social vitality.

She demonstrated that the vital ingredients for a successful city were a dense network of walkable streets; a rich variety of buildings of different styles and ages; and overlapping primary uses – residential, commercial, cultural etc – so that streets stay in use throughout the day.

Again, that now seems uncontroversial, but in the post-war period it went against all the architectural and planning orthodoxies of the era. This was an age in which the dreams (or nightmares) of Le Corbusier and the other modernists were made real. In many places it wasn’t just historic buildings that were destroyed, but entire streets and neighbourhoods; all to make way for the tower blocks, ring roads and other features of the promised concrete utopia.

Jacobs’ objections went well beyond the aesthetic, she showed how the top-down rationalism of the post-war planners would blight local economies and communities and create the problems that we now associate with the bleak brutalism of post-war architecture and infrastructure.

Jane Jacobs was hard to pin down politically. Her thought can be seen as both radical and traditionalist, pro-market and pro-government. As a result, she has fans (and detractors) on the left and the right. Perhaps she’s best described as a localist and a communitarian, a champion of those parts of the common good that emerge from the bottom up.

Over several books she continued to develop her ideas – and draw criticism for trespassing across disciplinary boundaries, ignoring theoretical conventions and the heinous crime of thinking aloud without appropriate credentials. A lot of the criticism was, of course, chauvinistic – with Jacobs dismissed as a ‘housewife’ or a ‘crazy dame’. Undeterred, she carried on into her late eighties, leaving the world to catch-up with her as she went along.

Her comparison of cities to living organisms or her argument that cities, not nations, are the basic unit of the global economy have now entered the mainstream – but in other respects the world is still catching up.

Ominously, her last book, published in 2004 (she died aged 89 in 2006) was her most pessimistic. Entitled Dark Age Ahead it’s a warning of the fracturing and decline of family, community, professions, academia and other vital institutions.

Some people see Dark Age Ahead as prophesying the Age of Trump, but her real point is about the danger of replacing institutions with ideology:

“Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances.”[1. Jane Jacobs, Dark Days Ahead, Random House (2004), p.115]

Jane Jacobs was a fearless foe of all things prefabricated, a free mind whose ideas have made the world a better place.

Recommended reading

Free minds: Elinor Ostrom – challenging conventional wisdom, she felled the tragedy of the commons

By Charlotte Pickles

There’ll be a handful of other nominees in the next 72 hours and so please follow us on Twitter to ensure you are notified of these and other UnHerd postings.

And please use the “HAVE YOUR SAY” button above if you have any views on what you’ve read – or if you’d like to publicly nominate another ‘Free Mind’. 

Look at the picture above this text. (Just for a second! Then come back and keep reading.) How does it make you feel?

Some of you will think “meh”; a very small number of British readers will think “police communication in the 1960s”. By far the largest single category of you, however — whichever words come to mind — will feel: happier. The sight of a battered old police box makes life better.

Whenever I pass the one on Buchanan Street in Glasgow I feel a near irresistible urge to push at the door. So Doctor Who — the blue box is, of course, his time-and-space machine, the Tardis — seems a useful device for an investigation into the appeal of the maverick.

I learnt two facts about “maverick” from Google. First of all, its American tang is authentic: the noun comes from Samuel A. Maverick, (1803-70), a Texan ranch owner who refused to brand his calves (so the link with UnHerd is strong.)

Secondly, according to books.google.com, the usage of the term has increased over the last few decades, and that also feels correct. We didn’t really talk about “political mavericks” in the 1980s, except possibly as an obituary-synonym for “failure”.

But the rise of populism, on both Left and Right, is by now well-documented on both sides of the Atlantic. Setting abuse to one side, or one’s well-founded distaste for their individual policies: for which noun would you reach, to describe Trump as well as Sanders, Boris as well as Corbyn? These men — we’ll come back to the gender — are all mavericks. (The other word often used to describe their appeal is “authentic”, and we’ll come back to that too.)

One of my dogmas is that truth lies in fiction. To understand a culture, examine its art — by definition, a novel, or a play, or a television drama, is fiction, and therefore a lie, but it’s also where the inner working of the human mind is laid bare. Because I’m middle-brow, the art I enjoy is lightweight and popular. Back to Doctor Who.

It must mean something, after all, to be one of the longest-running television dramas in the world, now 55 years old. Every generation, British and American children fall in love with the Time Lord, and their fondness for him persists into adulthood, quite unlike infantile fancies for Enid Blyton or talking trains. You don’t last that long without being an archetype.

We know he is a “renegade”, who left his home planet because of his people’s refusal to interfere in the deeds of the universe. Confusingly, he both ignores and lives by this norm. In the programme’s masterpiece, Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor draws back from exterminating the exterminators: he has the chance to prevent the evolution of the satanic machine-creatures, but refuses to do so. A refusal to alter history’s path, a faith in the future to deal with present ills, even the expulsion of humans from a pre-lapsarian Eden after experiments in re-creation (the Daleks are what happen if you listen to a serpentine “Man is now God” character): remind you of anyone?

His politics are as childish as they are appealing: he is instinctively on the side of the oppressed, and were he British, he’d definitely vote for Corbyn. Armies are always bad, though it’s somehow important to protect the weak. Goodness will deliver that protection, without the necessity for weapons. Anyone who’s felt the appeal of Quakerism knows what’s going on here.

And what are the character’s regenerations than a reflection of Christianity’s appeal? Each time the Doctor rises from the dead he is washed clean of past transgressions. Everyone deserves a second chance, and sometimes we get things wrong. To ask for forgiveness, and to receive it; to acknowledge one’s imperfections, and to be renewed as part of that process — these are precious human inventions (or theological gifts, depending on your disposition). They’re central to Doctor Who.

And “he” is now a “she”. If a Time Lord can become a Time Lady in an instant, what’s all this fuss about gender fluidity? On the substrate of a television programme our hopes and fears play out.

I’d argue that the programme’s longevity is evidence of our persistent longing for that which the character represents. We’re conditioned by our psyche to feel fondly towards blue boxes (bigger on the inside; aren’t we all?) that break us free from the daily grind, and the mavericks who fly them.

However strongly your conscious mind rejects his binary (good/evil; us/them) worldview, the maverick’s refusal to compromise his values — his authenticity, in other words — appeals. We are attracted by the very quality we know to be untrue; we hate compromise, even as we realise its necessity. So by failing to seek popularity, the maverick becomes popular. By refusing to admit complexity, complicated problems are diminished.

Thus the Doctor. But thus, too, Corbyn or Trump. And there’s the danger: it’s one thing to recognise our subconscious desires represented in fiction; quite another to elevate such desires to power.

Corbyn offers a “new kind of politics”: he means socialism. Trump says he’ll “make America great again”. We know perfectly well such phrases are just invented machines — blue boxes of words — that promise a universe rid of difficult decisions. Desirable; impossible. All you’ve got to do, children, is close your eyes, and believe.

There’ll be a couple more nominees in the next 72 hours, so please follow us on Twitter to ensure you are notified of these and other UnHerd postings.

And please use the “HAVE YOUR SAY” button if you have any views on what you’ve read – or if you’d like to nominate another ‘Free Mind’. 

I first came across the work of the development economist Michael Clemens when I began to investigate the aid industry almost a decade ago. It struck me as odd there was this hallowed international target for wealthy countries to hand over 0.7 per cent of national income to help poorer places. Then I stumbled on a paper he had written with a colleague in 2005 that laid bare the folly of this concept, explaining its unscientific origins and pointing out that updating the figures would mean an aid goal of just 0.01 per cent for rich nations. And that was 13 years ago, since when the world has become significantly wealthier.

Clemens, 45, is one of the most important and courageous global thinkers. That work on the aid target underlined his free-thinking approach, with rigorous reliance on data regardless of the conclusion. Colleagues at the Center for Global Development think tank in Washington – where he is a senior fellow – say he is remorseless in pushing them to always focus on evidence over ideology.

Two years later, I was working on a story in Ghana about the Millennium Villages. This daft idea was pushed by the pugnacious aid guru Jeffrey Sachs, who persuaded international donors, including Britain, to pour huge sums into his pet project. Clemens had, quite rightly, raised serious issues over imprecise evidence. I was struck by his tenacity in fighting his corner when the celebrated Colombia professor hit back. Although I suspect he is sceptical on much aid, Clemens won an award for a shared paper suggesting donations can assist growth despite wide variety of results and diminishing impact at higher levels.

On a bleak Sunday evening last October I headed to Hammersmith Apollo in London to see a show.  Queues of hundreds of people – mostly young – curled all the way in front of the building and around the block, destroying any chance of a pre-show drink in the bar.  Yet that night the Apollo was not hosting a comedian or pop band.  It was hosting an event with Sam Harris, the West Coast neuroscientist and author.  He was joined in conversation by his fellow author and scientific atheist Richard Dawkins and the internet talk-show host Matt Dillahunty.  But it was clear that it was Sam Harris that the crowd had come to see and his social media network that filled the 5,000 seater venue to capacity.

For the next 90 minutes Harris led the conversation on politics, science, ethics and God.  When the time came for audience questions the queues for the audience microphones stretched to the back of the hall.  The few questioners who did get a chance to ask something showed themselves to be part of a bunch of unusually cerebral people who were not only cool and diverse but clearly deeply engaged with their times.  It was the sort of crowd any politician would dream of being able to attract, while very few mainstream media figures would even be able to fill the bar of such a venue (people might come for the celebrity but they would not be detained by the thoughts).  Afterwards people mulled around, talking ideas, taking photos and finally getting those drinks in.  In some ways it was like a rock concert, but a rock concert of ideas.  For his followers, Harris is indeed a type of rock-star.

He first came to prominence in the post-9/11 years, firstly through his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. The book was an instant bestseller and was bracketed with a set of other ‘anti-God’ books that came out around the same time (not least Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great).  He became identified along with them as one of the ‘new atheists’ and along with the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett they all became known as the ‘four horsemen’ of the anti-theist movement of the 2000s.

For those who were paying attention it was obvious even from The End of Faith that Harris’s contributions did not simply consist of arguing around an absence.  The most controversial and brave parts of that book were not those aspects which reiterated in a newer and more sparkling form arguments against God which had existed before, but crucial arguments about what this meant for the moral universe the world now found itself in.  What should the attitude of non-believers be in an era of mass-terror being committed in the name of faith?  What accommodations could we (or should we) all come to agree upon?  In his writings throughout the rest of that decade – not least in his crystalline Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) Harris remained focussed on this question.  Not least because world events kept calling him back to the subject he had broken through in.  Throughout events like the Mohammed cartoon crisis (2005 – ?) Harris proved to be one of the few people who had a certain enough moral framework, a developed enough understanding of what was being attempted and enough residual outrage to make a stand against such violent incursions of the most extreme forms of faith back into the public square.

It led him to be pigeon-holed, certainly.  But by the turn of the decade it became clear that his strong anti-theism was not all there was to him (enough though that could have been).  In The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values (2010) and Waking Up: A guide to Spirituality without Religion (2014) he did what very few among the ‘new atheists’ had ever bothered to do.  He attempted to build a positive case in the terrain which the new atheists had scorched.  Unlike many in his own schools of thought he recognised that opposition was not enough, but that it was necessary to build and to address questions, rather than merely to savage them and shoot them down.  What he engaged in was not what was elsewhere described as ‘Atheism 2.0’ but atheism as a starting point for all the important subjects which still followed.

Of course individual readers will have individual reactions to the level of success or persuasiveness of these ventures.  But the sincerity of them, as well as the depth – and, perhaps most crucially – width of his learning is something which any honest critic as well as fan will note.  His works draw not just on philosophy and history but on the very latest developments on science, in particular neuroscience.

Perhaps it is this cutting-edge that allows the ‘Waking Up’ podcast which Harris began in 2013 to reach tens of millions of listeners around the world.  In these podcasts – a medium in which Harris was a relative pioneer – he mulls at length (sometimes for several hours) on the most serious themes.

He occasionally veers wholly into politics.  But more commonly he delves into issues deep beneath the events of any day’s news.  Recent podcasts have addressed ‘Consciousness and the self’ (a conversation with the professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Anil K. Seth) and a conversation on ‘The science of meditation’.

These podcasts are an extraordinary phenomenon.  With more than a million followers on Twitter, Harris is obviously able to point people to the irregularly posted discussions.  But what is most extraordinary – as audiences like that in London in October evidenced – is their reach.  Not just because they are listened to by millions of people at a time.  But because in their reach they demonstrate the failure of a popular broadcast media intent on ‘gotcha’ moments and ‘X annihilates Y’ screen-grabs.

Harris shows an entirely different model of how to engage with your time and its challenges.  Even with people who he has invited on with whom he disagrees he shows himself to be unfailingly, outstandingly courteous.  Without any grandstanding he demonstrates continuously that thoughtful dialogue remains possible even between people who fundamentally disagree.  When he crossed swords with the actor Ben Affleck on the Bill Maher show in the USA four years ago Affleck came across as a grand-standing ignoramus with a misplaced, Hollywood-induced, sense of his own significance.  Even as he rolled his finger and ordered his fellow guest to hurry things along (as though Affleck were the director of all situations he graces with his presence) Harris dealt with him courteously, carefully and – as audience reaction showed – devastatingly.

It is the same in the conversations which he hosts.  It is impossible to come away feeling that Harris has done anything other than give his guest their best shot.  A recent appearance by Harris on Russell Brand’s podcast exemplified the idea.  Brand showed off his wares in his familiar fashion (duck, weave, play the joker, turn into a pseudo-philosopher, then whoopsey-daisey there I go again, I’m a comic really etc, ad nauseum).  All the time Harris takes even what Brand says as a serious proposition, countering him and correcting him, but always with a courtesy and an attention to facts so fastidious that it makes you wonder whether it mightn’t at some point even make some impact of Brand. In an age of intellectual dishonesty Harris’s way of communicating face-to-face as well as with his readers betrays a commitment to honesty as well as honest dialogue which is unusual.  Of course it might yet prove essential.

Harris is still only 50.  Many television bookers will not have read his works. Quite a number of opinion-page editors will only vaguely have registered him.  But he is one of the free minds who is changing our world.  And he’ll keep doing that whether the old media notice what he’s doing or not.

Allan Mallinson nominated a very different 'free mind' earlier today...

Free Minds: Robert Sarah, the dissenting cardinal, seeking to save his Church

By Allan Mallinson

If I were setting the history paper for the Oxbridge entrance exam, I’d ask the question:

“What was the greater peril for the Catholic Church: the Reformation or the Second Vatican Council:?”[1. Second Vatican Council (“Vatican II” – the first had been in 1868) 21st  ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church (1962–65), announced by Pope John XXIII  in January 1959 as a means of spiritual renewal for the church and as an occasion for Christians separated from Rome to join in search for reunion]

The answer at first seems obvious: surely the Reformation, which permanently hived off a huge chunk of Catholic Christendom?

Yet a growing number of Catholics, clergy and lay, appear to think the answer might be the Second Vatican Council.

Chou En Lai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, when asked what he thought the historic impact of the French Revolution was, considered the question for a moment and replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” In truth, the story’s more complicated – the American translator said that Chou confused the Revolution with the Paris Commune – but the anecdote does make the point that history is rarely over and done with.

It’s certainly possible to make a case that the Reformation isn’t over. But it’s also possible to argue that Rome’s damage limitation exercise – including the Counter-Reformation – cured the infection, stopped its spread and allowed a significant convalescence which left the Church in better health than ever. That’s one of the pleasures of history.

On the other hand, an increasing number would argue that with the watering down – abandonment, even – of the Church’s unique claim to “Authority” (as if to Christ’s charge to St Peter, “tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam”,[2. “thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church”, (“and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”) Matthew 16:18-19] a “sed” – “but” – had been added), Vatican II introduced a bacillus to the Catholic Church’s central nervous system. 

What was the essence of Vatican II?

The argument pro Vatican II runs roughly thus: the Church is not against, not above, not apart, but in the modern world. Vatican II sought to engage, not condemn. The church, by its teaching and by its discipleship, has something to say to the world. At the same time, the world is saying something to the church.

This is Pope Francis’s position, and it is increasingly troubling a number of senior cardinals – the men who elect the pope and subsequently advise him – not least of whom is Cardinal (Robert) Sarah.

In one sense, it is difficult to characterise Cardinal Sarah as legitimately belonging in this week’s UnHerd series of free thinkers, or mavericks. Sarah, along with the other cardinals who are expressing unease with some of the things that Francis says, would argue that they were trying to be faithful to the Magisterium, which is not exclusively the pope’s dominion[3. “The task of interpreting the Word of God authentically has been entrusted solely to the magisterium of the Church, that is, to the Pope and to the college of bishops in communion with Him.” Catechism of the Catholic Church]. Indeed, they would seem to hold that in key respects, it is Francis himself who thinks and acts in an independent way.

Nevertheless, given the doctrine of papal supremacy – “the Pope enjoys, by divine institution, supreme, full, immediate, and universal power in the care of souls” (Catechism of the Catholic Church) – it is rather easier to portray dissenting cardinals as the ones who aren’t following the herd. 

Who is Cardinal Sarah?

Sarah (pronounced “Sarah”) is generally a quiet man – no propositions nailed to church doors; no gathering of kindred spirits into a following; no submissions to the pope (whether dubia – formal requests for clarification on teaching, and which imply dissent, as recently with three prominent cardinals – or, more serious, filial or fraternal corrections); indeed, his latest book is called The Power of Silence: Against the dictatorship of noise.

But in The Power of Silence, he implies that until the election of Francis, the Catholic Church had been the world’s most consistent and brightest beacon of truth on moral teachings. Indeed, many other Christians (and non-Christians) depended on the Church to promote and defend the teachings of Natural Law, the necessary foundation of civilised society (Pope John Paul II’s absolute opposition to the Soviet regime falls to mind).

But now, Sarah suggests, the Church itself is rapidly sliding into self-destructive worldliness and away from its core mandate, which is to preach the gospel in order to save souls.

Robert Sarah’s background is interesting. As ever, some use it to dismiss his views as “Third World” and therefore unsophisticated; others say it endows him with certain insight. He was born in 1945, in what was then French Guinea, of converts to Christianity from animism. He studied in various West African seminaries (it was a time of political upheaval, necessitating several moves) and in France, was ordained in 1969, and afterwards studied in Rome.

Pope John Paul made him a bishop only ten years later, and in 2001, brought him to Rome as secretary of the Congregation (department) for the Evangelisation of Peoples. On leaving Guinea, he spoke out against the government of Lansana Conté, saying that Guinean society was:

“…built on the oppression of the insignificant by the powerful, on contempt for the poor and the weak, on the cleverness of poor stewards of the public good, on the bribery and corruption of the administration and the institutions of the republic.”[4. Robert Cardinal Sarah, Nicolas Diat, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith, August 1, 2015]

Pope Benedict made him a cardinal in 2010, and in 2014 Pope Francis appointed him Prefect (head) of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments – a department central to the very being of the Church.

But then, in 2015, to his detractors Sarah was suddenly revealed as an arch-conservative. At the bishops’ synod to consider the findings of the mismanaged consultation on the family, he said that while the Church needed “to be inclusive and welcoming to all that is human”, it must still proclaim the truth in the face of two great challenges: “On the one hand, the idolatry of Western freedom; on the other, Islamic fundamentalism – atheistic secularism versus religious fanaticism.”

He has called gender ideology and ISIS the “two radicalizations” that threaten the family (thereby striking at the heart of Catholic understanding), the first through divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion; the second through child marriage, polygamy and the subjection of women.

Unsurprisingly, the remarks have made him “friends” and “enemies”. The latter gained some comfort recently when Pope Francis rejected Sarah’s call last year for priests to celebrate mass ad orientem, i.e. facing east, away from the congregation rather than west and towards. (With the substitution of the vernacular for Latin, ad occidentem was one of the most visible reforms of Vatican II.) Christopher Lamb, The Tablet’s Rome correspondent, wrote: “It is highly unusual for the Vatican to publicly slap down a Prince of the Church, yet not entirely surprising given how Cardinal Sarah has operated…”

So what does this mean for Cardinal Sarah and for the Church?

Liturgical matters – for example ad orientem vs ad occidentem – may be arcane, certainly for non-Catholics, but the sense that Pope Francis is following a false trail is not. The most recent issue arousing concern – and far greater than the form of worship, for it touches on the freedom of worship – is Francis’s rapprochement with Beijing over the appointment of bishops.

Catholics in China are divided between those in the “underground” community who recognise the Pope, and those who belong to the state-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association, whose bishops are appointed by the government. (If that sounds just rather Anglican, it’s much more sinister.) There are reports that Francis supported an offer made to two “underground” bishops to make way for government-appointed prelates, and that five government-appointed bishops have already been made valid in the eyes of the Church.

Cardinal (Joseph) Zen, until 2008 the Bishop of Hong Kong, has been outspokenly critical:

“So, do I think that the Vatican is selling out the Catholic Church in China? Yes, definitely, if they go in the direction which is obvious from all they are doing in recent years and months”.

It does not help that Bishop Sorondo, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, said on return from a visit to China last month: “Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese”.

When Pope Francis made Cardinal Sarah Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, the Catholic commentariat began speaking of him as papabile – having the quality to be made pope – but after his intervention at the synod on the family, and his “slapping down” over the ad orientem “misunderstanding”, his stock fell considerably. However, when the time comes for the election of a new pope, the Church’s internal contradictions – whether ascribable to the continuing working out of Vatican II or not – may well have reached the point where strong medicine is called for.

“At least you know where you are with Sarah” might well be the on dit in Conclave.

More on Christianity in China

He's trying, but China's Church is too big for Xi to suppress

By Jonathan Aitken

Alisdair Macintyre once told the theologian Stanley Hauerwas that he regretted writing that famous last passage of his great 1981 work of moral philosophy, After Virtue. Nonetheless, it was that book, and its stirring final call to action, that summoned together a very diverse collection of admirers. To many of us, that last paragraph felt like a dark prophecy, a warning from history, and a vague, sketchy outline of what the coming resistance might look like.

In terms of its practical effect on me, it was the single most important piece of philosophical writing that I have ever read. And it remains so to this day.

We are entering a time of crisis, claimed Macintyre. The Enlightenment destroyed the idea that human life is imbued with purpose and direction. It took morality away from the community and made it a matter of individual choice, thus replacing morality with individual self-assertion. The final passage reads:

If my account of our moral condition is correct we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.

And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict.

Rod Dreher’s best selling The Benedict Option (2017) is the latest in a long line of reactions to this passage. Christians, he argues, have lost the culture wars in the United States. And a new form of resistance is called for.

In this country, Macintyre’s philosophical cry bounced around in academic circles during the back end of the 20th century, emerging into mainstream politics during the beginnings of this one. It was John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory (1991), heavily influenced by Macintyre, that led to the whole Red Tory then Blue Labour movements. It was Macintyre’s analysis that inspired the theologian Philip Blond to help persuade David Cameron to start talking about “the big society”. Likewise, the thinking of people such as the excellent Maurice Glassman still owes a great deal to the debates that a number of Cambridge theologians (including Rowan Williams) had in the 1980’s following After Virtue.

But Macintyre’s reception in the United States has been very different. Whereas in Britain, the political influence of After Virtue has been on those who have been seeking to bring new life to society in general, with the conservative Christian Rod Dreher (and with Stanley Hauerwas too), the After Virtue legacy has taken on a more sectarian and inward-looking turn.

Public culture has become irredeemable, Dreher argues, it has been captured by the forces of individualism and liberalism, and there is no way to build communities of moral purpose in such hostile territory. The Benedict Option represents a tactical withdrawal, an attempt by serious Christians to regroup in community, to construct an ark with which to ride out the storm and from there to present a challenge to mainstream culture.

This is why I admire Dreher: he is one of the few conservative Christians to recognise and publicly to admit that the United States is not really a Christian country at all, that it worships a god that has been made in its own image – that is, it worships itself. And that capitalism and a belief in the total freedom of the individual is not the unmitigated good that the Christian Right has so often trumpeted.

All this is very brave of Dreher. I just watched an interview he gave to Fox News explaining his position. The interviewer wore a look of total confusion, failing completely to understand how a conservative Christian such as Dreher could think of the United States as enemy territory. Such has been the elision of Christianity and American nationalism for so many.

As Dreher rightly argues, much that passes for orthodox Christianity in American life is really a moralistic version of Deism. And this pale reflection of traditional Christianity has itself been hollowed out by the continual march of market-driven acquisitiveness. It is good that conservatives are beginning to wake up to the fact that that the market is not their friend. And I don’t suppose the interviewer from Fox would be any better disposed to the Benedict Option if he were to discover that Macintyre was originally a Marxist.

Of course, things are considerably worse for religious believers here in Europe. Different, but worse. Iceland is now preparing to make circumcision illegal – and a survey out this week by the National Secular Society indicates that 62% of Britons agree with them. In France, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, the burqa has been banned. Ofsted the UK education inspection body, now wants to regulate what is taught at Orthodox Jewish schools in North London. Halal meat is being banned. Christians are sacked for wearing the cross as jewellery at work.

Throughout Europe, the state, under the increasingly confident influence of secular liberalism, continues a malign programme of interfering in the lives of religious believers and seeking to marginalise them from the public sphere. Perhaps more religious believers on this side of the pond, too, should wake up and appreciate that the modern liberal state is no longer a friend to religious belief. Liberal in both the social and the economic sense, the modern social consensus is built around the freedom of the individual.

That is why Christians in America couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary. And they were right not to. But Trump is clearly not the answer either. Indeed, as Dreher rightly insists, Trump is just another symptom of the deepening problem. There are no good options left. And so all people of faith have to prepare for the dark days that are to come.

Dreher is wrong about a lot, though. Like so many American conservatives, he is creepily obsessed with homosexuality. His analysis of Freud is risible. And unlike the pacifist Hauerwas, he doesn’t understand that the greatest corruption of public Christianity in the US comes from the American war machine. Jesus didn’t care all that much about sex. And said nothing whatsoever about homosexuality. But he cared a great deal about loving your enemies.

The fixation that American conservatives have with sex is a convenient way for them to avoid a much harder and challenging question: the unchristian obsession they have with guns and bombs. I would prefer my Benedict Option to look a bit more like that proposed by the extraordinary Dorothy Day who founded a number of Catholic communities of resistance committed to non-violence and feeding the poor. But in the context of the scale of the incoming crisis, this may look like haggling over the details.

It is indeed odd that a socialist like me finds common cause with an American conservative like Rod Dreher. But the faith we share is under threat. We both diagnose liberalism as the common enemy. And opposition makes for unlikely bedfellows.

Another Christian thinker in this Free Minds series...

Free minds: Michael Schluter - the untiring advocate of an alternative to the materialism of Left and Right

By Tim Montgomerie

I hesitate to tell you that my chosen ‘free mind’ is the first and only woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, because while that is undoubtedly a barrier-breaking achievement (see Victoria Bateman on why economics has a women problem), it is not why she gets my nomination. Her work, and the approach she took to it, explains that. But it does tell us something about the mindset of my maverick: she won the highest prize in economics as a political scientist even though as a young girl she had been dissuaded from studying maths.[1. .‘Elinor Ostrom’, The Economist, 30 June 2012; Ostrom shared the 2009 Nobel Prize with Oliver E. Williamson, a University of California economist]

Elinor Ostrom, political scientist and Nobel laureate, fundamentally changed the way we think about environmental governance and human behaviour. And in the process showed us that to understand economics, you have to understand people.

In 1968, ecologist and philosopher Garrett Hardin, popularised the idea of the ‘tragedy of the commons’. The theory claims that uncontrolled access to common pool resources, for example fisheries and forests, inevitably leads to over-exploitation, and therefore their depletion. To prevent this, Hardin argued, either government must intervene by controlling or regulating their use, or the resources must be privatised.

It is a dark assessment of human nature, one in which unfettered greed, and associated violence, cannot be tamed without formal laws and structures – and one which became mainstream belief.

Elinor Ostrom, however, inspired by her initial PhD study of water management in California, rejected this Hobbesian view of human nature. She rejected the binary state-private choice, instead proving through empirical research that communities can organise themselves to manage communal resources.

Ostrom showed that communities are more than capable of self-regulating their use of ‘the commons’, by creating their own governance institutions, and defining their own rules. And that conversely, private and public institutions can lead to the very degradation of resources that Hardin feared.

In demonstrating this, as one London School of Economics paper on the work of the Nobel laureate puts it, Ostrom “defined a field of research, and radically changed understandings”.[2. Tim Forsyth and Craig Johnson, Elinor Ostrom’s legacy: governing the commons, and the rational choice controversy, London School of Economics, August 2014] Research that her (and her husband’s) Indiana University Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis continues to undertake.

Ostrom – and this is key – was not saying that decentralised, community-organised solutions always produce the best models for managing resources. She recognised that in some communities, state and private institutions may well be better approaches, particularly where resource boundaries are hard to define or where communities are more transient and therefore lack the social capital required for collective action. In fact, she identified many successful models of management that involve mixed regimes. But her presumption, well evidenced, was in favour of bottom-up, not top-down. She championed polycentric systems of government, that is multiple governing authorities at different levels, which she argued are far less open to capture by vested interests.

It is exactly this flexible approach that makes Ostrom’s work so important. She may have enabled the creation of theoretic frameworks, but Governing the commons, her seminal 1990 book, is no theoretical treatise. She was not taking an ideological stance. As Kings College London professor Mark Pennington, notes: “Throughout her career Elinor Ostrom was keen to avoid crude ideological labelling”, instead “chart[ing] an intellectual course avoiding conventional left versus right confrontations”. Which explains why both left and right lay claim to her ‘philosophy’.

It was through actually observing communities that Ostrom felled the “tragedy of the commons”. The scope of her fieldwork was remarkable: she studied urban and rural communities across the world, from Nigeria to Japan, Mexico to Switzerland, Poland to Australia. As well as, of course, her home nation America.

It was this approach, as much as her findings, that set her aside from her peers. Free minds are nothing if not open minds. To truly challenge conventional wisdom, you have to be willing to question and learn. That is precisely how Ostrom worked. Reflecting on the Nobel laureate’s life, academic peers from Princeton and Stanford described her as “fearless about venturing into new methodologies”, Ostrom “revelled in what she could learn from the very best people that she could find in one after another field”.[3. Kenneth Arrow, Robert Keohane and Simon Levin, ‘Elinor Ostrom: An uncommon woman for the commons’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, August 2012]

Her courage, in the face of accepted norms and prejudices, to think and work differently has led not just to new theoretical frameworks and academic research, but to real-life impact. Her insights have been applied in a multitude of settings and to a plethora of problems, including climate change, international development and public governance. I can’t help wondering if her approach to human behaviour – that to understand it you have to observe it first-hand – had been adopted more broadly by economists and political scientists, we might have better understood, even predicted, the upheavals of recent years.

Recommended reading

Economics has a women problem, which means it has a real-world problem

By Victoria Bateman

The practical difficulties of implementing the principle are wide-ranging, but with a quarter of Chinese citizens set to be aged 60 or over within little more than a decade, the care of the elderly is a big public policy issue – and not one the Chinese state has only just stumbled upon. As I’ve noted elsewhere, “the Confucian principle of filial piety – 孝 or xiào – is even enshrined into the nation’s constitution. Children who neglect their parents face up to five years in prison”.

The rise and rise of loneliness in the western world – the subject of one of Giles Fraser’s recent columns – is one manifestation of the inter-generational breakdown we are beginning to experience. “Beginning” probably isn’t the correct word – because at the other end of the age spectrum the effects are already advanced…

Source: NPR.

Putnam isn’t alone in coming to the conclusion that the collapse of the real social networks that surround, educate, civilise, motivate and safeguard children (or which – because they’re missing or have been emasculated – don’t) amounts to a big deal.

• Charles Murray, from the other side of the American political divide, reached similar conclusions in Coming Apart. In a book subtitled The State of White America 1960-2010, Murray examines the “erosions of family and community life” that are overwhelmingly evident within, and disproportionately affecting poorer communities (partly I’d argue because of economic change) and, he concludes, “that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness”. Those erosions have exploded into full public view in recent times – with the opioid crisis, the reversal of the “unstoppable” rise in US life expectancy and in the election of a certain hotelier to the highest of offices.
• David Brooks in his book The Road to Character challenged his readers to build lives that are characterised by deeds, values and networks that might be most likely to be celebrated in a eulogy rather than what would look good on a CV.
• In Steve Hilton’s More Human, the former advisor to David Cameron concludes “that we now know that the quality and style of parenting received by a child is a better predictor of success than anything else – including the economic circumstances of the family”. And, appropriately enough, those words and his exploration of the the importance of the family come in a chapter billed as all about inequality. “Appropriately”, because the beginnings of economic poverty lie in relational poverty.

These themes have fascinated me for nearly three decades. While I was at Exeter University (probably around 1989) I spent a summer in Cambridge for a week of teachings hosted by the Jubilee Centre. At the time, Church of England thinking (and, repeating a theme, “thinking” probably isn’t the right word) was summed up in the Faith in the City report.

FitC lacked philosophical distinctiveness. Much of it was simply a call for even more of the kind of government interventionism that produced the Brixtons and Toxteths of the Britain of then or, for that matter, the Detroit-ian Gothams of today. It reinforced the idea that voters had to choose between the Left’s (and Anglicanism’s) bigger state and the Right’s invisible hand.

The Jubilee Centre and its leader – Michal Schluter – offered something different. Something that found comprehensive expression in the book he co-wrote with David Lee in 1993: “The R Factor“. Inspired by the Bible, Schluter found evidence for private enterprise (in God as Creator and man made in his image) and for state action (the rendering to Caesar) but – most of all – he found evidence for a philosophy of valuing relationships. Noting, for example, the Bible’s repeated calls to care for the widow, the orphan and the alien (migrant), his “Relationships Foundation” recommended what it called a “triple test” for all of public policy:

“We want all parties to subscribe to this basic premise: that policy development, proposals for legislation, and government action should all be subject to a triple test – economic, environmental and social. The economic test has long dominated political debate. Recently, however, policymakers have begun to move towards a second test by recognising the importance of the environment and seeking the tools necessary to address that vital sphere of life in their assessments. We now need to go further and add to this double test the neglected third element – the social test… The social aspect of ‘The Triple Test’ is fundamentally about relationships… Public policy is never neutral and we believe that policy makers and implementers should always test their proposals not only to ensure, as far as is possible, that these do not damage existing relational links, but also to see if ways can be found to encourage people increasingly to connect with each other in the public sphere. Strong communities and extended families can build financial and social capital, increasing wellbeing and reducing long-term pressures on public spending.”

I can’t do justice to the wealth of research and policy tools that Michael Schluter and his institutional creations have produced over the years (and wouldn’t defend or subscribe to all of them either)… but in projects such as its “index” measuring the cost of family breakdown; the family test; Keep Time for Children; promotion of relational justice; and the promotion of better relationships in the workplace, Schluter has stood apart from the almost absolute materialism that has not only dominated the political Left and Right but which has too often captured the church and other institutions that should have known (and should know) better.

I’m not sure there’s much evidence yet from the public policy world that Schluter-ian relationism is on the rise (as is the case with another of my intellectual heroes Michael Novak). But free minds are still free minds even if they’re not victorious in what they argue for. And in Putnam, Murray, Brooks, Hilton and others – his ideas’ time may be finally edging closer, at least in the intellectual arena. I hope so.

Part one of UnHerd's 'Free Minds' series

Free minds: Sherry Turkle - humanity's advocate against the machine

By Nigel Cameron

When you stop by her office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, doesn’t wave you to a seat in front of a mahogany professorial desk. She offers you your choice of her comfy couches (and, at least in my case, she offers you coffee). For she isn’t simply a sociologist and ethnographer and anthropologist. She’s also a psychologist and psychoanalyst. And while much of her life has been devoted to studying digital technology, her first book was actually about Sigmund Freud. If ever we mere humans needed an advocate in the face of the technological-industrial complex and its devices, we’d hope for someone like her.

1984: Orwell, Turkle, Zuckerberg

There were a mere ten million computers in the entire United States when Sherry Turkle, already a professor at MIT, staked her claim to be the champion of human questions in the dawning digital era. Back in that haunting year, 1984. Back before any one of the companies that dominate today’s internet had yet been heard of. Even before Tim Berners-Lee had come up with the World Wide Web. Somewhat curiously, it was also the year Mark Zuckerberg was born.

In her prescient book The Second Self, she reviewed the rapid spread of what she called the “computer culture,” and reflected that – even then – “in one way or another” it “touches us all.” Grasping in a single phrase what many would come to see as the core question of the 21^st century, she subtitles the volume “Computers and the Human Spirit.”

Reading The Second Self a generation later is an eerie experience.

Take children, for example.

Long, long before Mark Zuckerberg launched Messenger Kids to bring six-year-olds into Facebook, before Mattel launched Hello Barbie, their chatty robot doll, Sherry Turkle was studying “children’s relationships with computers.”

“I found three stages …. First there is a “metaphysical” stage: when very young children meet computers they are concerned with whether the machines think, feel, are alive. Older children, from age seven or eight on, are less concerned with speculating about the nature of the world than with mastering it.” And in adolescence “computers become part of a return to reflection, this time not about the machine but about oneself.”

What distinguishes Turkle’s work from so much commentary on the rise of the digital world is its basis in research. Her observations are rooted in something other than opinion and anecdote. “This work is a field study based on many thousands of hours of interviews and observations,” she writes.

And she’s continued asking questions about the digital revolution and the human spirit ever since – and seeking answers grounded in sober facts and analysis.

Let’s talk

As Carlos Lozada in the Washington Post notes in reviewing her latest book[1.  From “The book that will have everyone talking about how we never talk anymore her latest book”, Washington Post, 1 October 2015: “We think our devices deliver comfort and efficiency, but, in Turkle’s telling, they offer loneliness and disarray. “Every time you check your phone in company,” she reminds, “what you gain is a hit of stimulation, a neurochemical shot, and what you lose is what a friend, teacher, parent, lover, or co-worker just said, meant, felt.””], Reclaiming Conversation, it would be a mistake to lump it together with the stream of “tech-skeptic manifestos.”  “This is a persuasive and intimate book,” he writes, “one that explores the minutiae of human relationships. Turkle uses our experiences to shame us, showing how, phones in hand, we turn away from our children, friends and co-workers, even from ourselves.”

The situation is one familiar to all of us. In Lozada’s summary:

“You’re at the dinner table, or in a meeting, or at a baseball game, or in the classroom, or in your bedroom, or at a bar or, yes, in the bathroom — and you’re on your phone. You might be talking, but more likely you’re texting, posting, swiping, liking, tweeting, buying, browsing or, in my favorite metaphor of digital existence, “refreshing,” as though life’s staleness can be washed away with every new, fully realized screen.”

A super-abundance of conversation, surely!

Closely related...

How smartphones make our young people unhappy

By Peter Franklin

And yet:

“This is the world of incessant connection, and for all the communication it supposedly provides, it’s destroying one essential thing: open-ended conversation. “We are being silenced by our technologies,” Sherry Turkle warns, “in a way, ‘cured of talking.’” And that silence means our ability to relate to others is disappearing, too. “We face a flight from conversation that is also a flight from self-reflection, empathy, and mentorship.”

Three strikes…

While Sherry Turkle’s early work focused on humans and on computers that actually looked like computers, the context today can be summed up as the conjunction of three factors:

1. First, the basic inter-connectedness of the internet, which was dramatically enhanced by the invention of the Web (1991);
2. Second, the development of social media (Facebook was founded in 2004, though AOL, 1985, and MySpace, 2003, were the pioneers);
3. And, third, the near-miraculously explosive deployment of smartphones (iPhone: 2007), putting super-computers into our hands and pockets.

We have become so used to these little devices. It is sobering to be reminded of the impact of “Moore’s Law” – the principle that computer power keeps doubling as the price drops. The numbers are truly astonishing. In the past sixty years, computing power has increased by a factor of one trillion. An iPhone 4, if you can still find one, has the same power as the Cray super-computer of 1985[2.  Read Maddie Stone on The trillion-fold increase in computing power, visualized].

It is these technical developments that have created today’s social media/smartphone challenge.

For great and small, we members of Homo sapiens are rarely far from our smartphones. The single most startling story of the digital revolution is the staggering speed with which the “mobile device” has spread into the hands of billions.

A decade after the launch of the iPhone in 2007, the numbers are stunning. According to a recent Pew study[3.  Among ten findings about smartphones by Pew: “Overall, 12% of U.S. adults were “smartphone-only” internet users in 2016 – meaning they owned a smartphone but did not have broadband internet at home.”], in the United States three-quarters of adults own a smartphone – including 64% of those living in a household with an income of less than $30,000. Half of young adults live in a household that owns three or more of them. As smartphones get cheaper, their global spread continues. One projection is for six billion to be in circulation by the year 2020.

Real life

Over the years, Sherry Turkle has deployed her incessant questioning on several fronts. She has written about simulations, about our capacity to adopt alternative personalities online, about the loneliness that bizarrely can so easily be the concomitant of our endless engagement in digital communication. But it’s here, in her beguiling advocacy of conversation – packed with telling observations and haunting incidents – that her campaign for the human spirit comes to a head. In the words of novelist Jonathan Franzen, she “serves as a kind of conscience for the tech world.”

And in a remarkable tribute, technology icon Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine and as far from being a Luddite as one can get, has this to say:

“Smartphones are the new sugar and fat: They are so potent they can undo us if we don’t limit them. Sherry Turkle introduces a lifesaving principle for the twenty-first century: face-to-face conversation first. This heuristic really works; your life, your family life, your work life will all be better. Turkle offers a thousand beautifully written arguments for why you should lift up your eyes from the screen.”

The bottom line

“Why a book on conversation?” asks Sherry Turkle. “We’re talking all the time. We text and post and chat…. Among family and friends, among colleagues and lovers, we turn to our phones instead of each other.”

She begins her book with a quote from Thoreau’s Walden: “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

It actually ends, on the back cover, with a review from the Boston Globe: “Talk is cheap, but conversation is priceless.”

***

MORE ON TURKLE, MORE BY TURKLE

FROM TED TALKS, 2012

As we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other? Sherry Turkle studies how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication — and asks us to think deeply about the new kinds of connection we want to have.