J.E. Robertson's Open Salon Blog

Steve Jobs Leaves a Legacy of Smart Design for Human Need

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 22:10:08 -0400

Steve Jobs was not a run-of-the-mill CEO. He was not the usual technology wiz. He was not lost in the abstract. He was not working for gain alone. Steve Jobs earned immense wealth and achieved some of the most pervasive influence over human events in recent decades, through the strength and passion of his mind. He was a bold visionary who imagined what had not been possible before, and laboring against the seeming constraints of the material universe, made beauty where there had been none before.

To say Steve Jobs contributed mightily to the development of information technology would be a gross understatement, almost an irrelevance. His vision and his efforts, along with the company he founded, had a clear, persistent and verifiable, direct impact on the evolution of the technological paradigm in which we all now live. He not only saw, when many could not, that IT was for everyone; he saw that it was in serving everyone that IT could actually have real power.

He demanded design that worked for people, worked with people, made the physical interaction with information intuitive, unobtrusive, second-nature, intelligent. His work foreshadowed what we now call smart phones, because he always seemed to be focused on how smart design would allow people to be smarter, to know more, to work, invent, achieve, and communicate, more rapidly and more persistently.

That commitment to design in service of human aspirations, whether grandiose or trivial, whether global or hyper-local, brought people together. Families separated by thousands of miles found themselves brought closer together by tools enabling them to see each other, to follow stories, to build a reservoir of human content, to live entangled in one another's lives, even when separated.

People looking to spontaneously collaborate with strangers found that Apple was building devices and software laced with the intuitive genius, the knowledge of human psychology, the democratizing vision, necessary to make such collaborations not only viable, but vibrant and amazing.

It became a hallmark of Apple devices that they not only fit their purpose, and reduced the time it takes to achieve a task by way of technology, but that they were also beautiful and enjoyable. Jobs never allowed Apple to stand on one or the other alone, and never to fail to be useful and trustworthy. He demanded that his team produce cutting-edge devices that were applicable, reliable, beautiful and fun to use.

The result was an embrace of complexity that recognized not only the possibility of, but the need for grace under pressure. It was always a sign of respect for the people who would purchase what Jobs and Apple produced that he demanded such quality on all of these fronts, and quality that managed complexity not only ably, but intuitively and as if complexity were in fact simplicity, only richer.

Engineers, designers, inventors, visionaries on scales large and small, writers, architects, composers, have all learned from this astounding and prolonged performance of conductive imagination: Jobs thought about how to tackle the problems that face people as they manage information, communication, time and necessity, and he built ways for them to do all of this swiftly, gracefully and enjoyably. He freed people from what intimidates them about complexity—its ability to rob us of time.

Ultimately, with Steve Jobs as with so many other creative geniuses who have offered us visions of a different future, we must ask ourselves if we had enough time with him to learn as much as we could. Part of his legacy, though, must be that we believe in our own ability to imagine, to do and to achieve, and that we demand that we do so at the highest level possible.

What we have lost with the passing of Steve Jobs is much more than the man who gave us the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad—each of them revolutionary devices that altered many things about how people interact with information, how they communicate, and even how they transport themselves and their experiences around the globe. What we have lost with the passing of Steve Jobs is a light in the darkness, a vehement optimist of the truest kind, who understood implicitly—and demanded action from that understanding—that the optimal is always possible and that aspiring to anything else is irrational and counterproductive.

Many other people will tell his story. Maybe the people who knew him personally should do that. For us, here, it is best to describe his work for its contribution, and his spirit as the motivational energy behind that work:

In so many ways, Jobs exemplified that simple, yet elegant advice that we should all dare to Think Different, that we should build the best vision of what can be, directly from our imagination, in touch with the limits of the physical world, but unconstrained by the dominating conventions that would undermine the reach of human potential. Steve Jobs' work has made the sphere of human interaction more diverse, more agile, and more humane. Those of us who benefit from his commitment and genius every day must seek to use his creations, his vision and his legacy to imagine, and to build, a better world.

Allen West's "Gene Pool" Slur is Disgrace to the Nation

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 10:07:09 -0400

Courage is a spiritual quality, and does not require brash acts or radical declarations to show through. Courage requires humility, and the ability to see the humanity in others. Courage requires strength of character, and a commitment to be just, to be truthful, to be more than the hostility that emerges from primal fight or flight responses.

Service is about giving. It is about being generous with other people. It is about going beyond what is asked, and doing something more. Service is about being the virtues one seeks to bring forth into the world. It means wanting not personal glory or vindication, but the opportunity to make things right for others, even when less service-minded peers urge hostility.

Values are things of enduring truth. To know value, one must cultivate the kind of inner character that not only meshes with one's own tribe, but understands the value of connecting with people who seem different. To value democracy is to be democratic, to accept that difference of views does not render a person illegitimate or fit for extermination.

Democracy is founded on the idea that all people have value. It is founded on the principle that under no circumstances should the failure of weak individuals in positions of influence to avoid condemning their rivals to non-existence bring about the degradation or injury of any human being.

People fail. People aspire, genuinely, to ideals they fail to live up to. People in public life have it particularly hard, because they are asked to exhibit the highest virtues, at all times, despite the immense pressure they are under. And people in public life often fail to meet those demands. Some say terrible, crazy, irrational things.

Some even labor deliberately at hurting people they dislike. They lose sight of what it means to be a free person, to be a citizen, to sign up to a social contract in which all human beings have value. They give in to the urge to speak in violent terms, to wish for harm to people they dislike. Some joke about it. It is always tragic, and always a moral failing, however momentary.

But sometimes an individual in public life goes beyond the boundaries of dramatic convention, beyond hyperbole, beyond irresponsibility, beyond accidental moral failing, beyond vitriol and degradation, and makes extreme, scorched-earth declarations that have no connection of any kind whatsoever to the vast and complicated fabric of human moral conduct.

Sometimes, people reveal that they harbor intense resentment, even deep hatred, for people they have never met, and simply because they are different. This is beyond sad and tragic, beyond moral failing. It is a surrender to the forces of violent hostility, and a betrayal of what democracy is designed to achieve.

For me, when that individual is an elected official, sworn to uphold the standards and principles of our democratic rule of law, that violation of the social contract is particularly frightening and unconscionable.

I do not know Allen West. I have never met him, and I do not follow his life of public service closely. I know there are people who like and respect him, and for that reason, I feel it is vitally important to examine the moral quality of at least one grave departure from reason and civility. I trust that there are times when he is a decent and caring person. And I believe the relevance of that is lost when such a person abandons that awareness of decency and caring and sets about trying to rule out a segment of the population as somehow unfit for inclusion.

It may be that there is no sentiment that is more evil than the sincere belief that there are people who are somehow not fully human, who "contaminate", to "threaten" the pure population, simply by virtue of their existence. It is not necessary to make any reference to the evil this idea can do. It is too apparent to anyone who thinks, reasons, feels and lives in this world.

Allen West sent out an email to supporters whom he addressed, generically, as "Dear Patriot", which ended with this unbelievable statement: "I must confess, when I see anyone with an Obama 2012 bumper sticker, I recognize them as a threat to the gene pool."

His meaning could not be more clear: he believes that the purity of the patriotic "gene pool" is threatened by citizens who express a view he does not share. It is not necessary to compare this way of thinking with any political system from history; it suffices to describe it as what it is: a vile defamation of what democracy is about, and a deliberate confession of one man's visceral unwillingness to honor the principles of the Constitution he is sworn to uphold.

It is a defamation of every person who has ever sought to serve this nation, in whatever capacity, because no one of character and worth ever chose to serve this nation with the hope that their service would result in a system where public officials declare the unfitness for life of entire segments of the population. No one ever envisioned that a great America would behave in so desperate, so low, so undemocratic a fashion.

The email is full of false statements, some designed to mislead readers about whether they will have to pay if taxes on billionaires go up, when in fact, it is because taxes on billionaires are at historic lows that less affluent people are paying more than their share. But nevermind that; Mr. West is entitled to tell the story as he sees it, to try to be persuasive, because that is part of what he does for a living.

Voters should have the opportunity to decide if they want to spend their vote on someone who repays that support with lies, smears and hostility. What is so important, and so unfortunate, about this particular infraction, is that Mr. West has sworn to honor a system in which all people have value, and he has openly and deliberately gambled his honor on the idea that millions of his fellow citizens are, by his suggestion, genetically unfit for citizenship.

If everyone else in Congress is more or less honorable enough to ensure that our democracy is not so degraded as Mr. West would have it, then we can still honor the work of principled public servants, like Pres. Obama, who never resort to such malign attacks, and who lead by serving, and we can still use our vote to unseat those who show themselves unwilling or unable to live up to the moral requirements of public office.

I believe we are a courageous enough, a principled enough people, with enough awareness of what is really valuable in human society and in our democracy, to resist the sinister temptations of Mr. West's debased rhetoric. I want to believe that even someone willing to engage in such behavior might find the courage, the principle and the awareness of what is valuable in human society and in the human soul, to apologize, as publicly and as visibly as possible, for having so transgressed the boundaries of service to our democracy.

Mr. West has a moral obligation to recognize his error, and to apologize. And we the people of the United States, all people of all factions, all backgrounds and origins, all personalities and commitments, should demand that he do so, or that his party recognize the urgency of the need to ask him to sit out the next campaign, or be opposed by people more committed to the values of our democracy.

When I Felt Close to the Heart of American Culture

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:07:15 -0400

I used to think the most American I would ever feel would have been during my childhood, playing spring baseball, and going for hot dogs, or meeting my grandfather's friends at his reserved regular table at the local diner and being treated to the five and dime.

When I was 17, I journeyed into the wilderness with some nature experts and a Lakota elder. We first held a reconciliation ceremony, in the local Catholic church, reconciliation between the Lakota and the European Catholics who had replaced their culture in North America. It was the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landing, and it was symbolic. Those wounds are not so easily healed. But it felt like we were near the beating heart of a continent, taking the steps we needed to take in order to make sense of who we were.

For much of my life, I was certain we were ascending a virtuous spiral, getting better, getting closer to the ideals we had once set out as our founding principles. I would have told you that it was those clean, Rockwellesque childhood moments, or that sacred time in the woods, that made me feel most like a true American.

And then we became a controversy. Or I noticed we had.

Living in Europe, in my early thirties, enjoying the rhythm of life in Barcelona, a different pattern of everyday beauties, my own creative life, I found myself describing the virtues of American democracy. In 2007 and 2008, I became known among my peers for explaining how the United States was far more liberal than they imagined it, how we were a more sophisticated electorate, how something was stirring.

In Paris, in London, and in Barcelona, I found myself explaining over and over again that they could not understand it, but far from being "not ready" for Barack Obama to win the presidency, what was going on at home was that Obama embodied intangible qualities that we could all recognize as the sage and humane ideals we assign to the notion of an American president.

This kind of thinking rubbed up against a more cynical, hard-bitten attitude toward democracy. In Spain, for instance, democracy is only 30 years old, and some would say most Spaniards had not really discovered anything like "people power" until this year's May 15 protests. In France, the ideals of democracy are a local product, but the powers that be have never truly left the scene.

As far as the United States was concerned, good people, with no anti-American bias would tell me they thought I was dreaming and that the US was too powerful and too mired in the injustices of the past to ever allow Barack Obama to become president. I found myself taking on the role of patriot, explaining that Obama's campaign was an awakening, certainly, but not of a backward nation; it was an awakening of a more enlightened electorate, of a nation that had grown more progressive overall, and that demanded virtues, not Machiavellian manipulations, from its public officials.

For me, it was starting to look like he was unbeatable, given that basic American optimism he so ably tapped into. If I had been asked about my most American feeling, I would then have said it was in this rediscovery and this defense of optimism. I would have said that being in Europe, proudly and with certainty defending the underlying optimism and openness of my country, was when I felt most American.

But then, Barack Obama won the presidency. I was vindicated. Our nation was vindicated. Not by electing a Democratic candidate, or a progressive, but because the electorate had risen to the occasion and voted for a more thoughtful, more visionary political discourse. We had shown the world we could reinvent ourselves, we could live up to our ideals, that here: reason could govern.

On January 20, 2009, I had the privilege to join 2.5 million other people on the National Mall. It was a frigid day of sub-freezing temperatures. And it was a day of joy. It was so joyous an atmosphere, with so much tolerance and good will among the millions gathered, that even Pat Buchanan said of the inauguration that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever witnessed in Washington, DC.

On that day, I could feel the resounding ideals I had always heard of as a child, that made grown men tear up when listening to the Star-spangled Banner, even at recreational baseball games, reverberating all around me. On that day, I could feel the genuine optimism I had proclaimed to my European friends as being fundamental to our culture of civics and democracy.

I could cite a thousand tiny moments in my life that seem to represent something emblematic, iconic or resonant about our nation's diverse and shared culture. But on January 20, 2009, celebrating the success and advance of our democracy, I felt directly connected to what is best in our culture. Nothing, in today's world, seems more American to me than joining together in an informal fabric, with millions of other Americans, despite the extreme conditions, to honor our ideals and to chart a future of humane and optimistic democracy.

The work that has kept me closest to that sentiment has been my work volunteering with a non-partisan, non-profit organization, working to build the political will for needed policy changes on Capitol Hill. This June, 80 volunteers from across North America, held 144 meetings on Capitol Hill, and that feeling of being part of the process, of being in touch with our government, was palpable.

In this country, ordinary people really can make the future, if we work to build our own ideals into the landscape of policy and practice. We can speak directly to our government, and work to build consensus for intelligent, collaborative policy to build a better world for ourselves and our children.

How to Make Our Culture a Thinking Culture

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 19:03:28 -0400

The best thing a young intellect can learn is that knowing and creativity are not distinct disciplines. The idea that all knowledge can fit into scannable multiple-choice tests is undermining this vital insight. Students are graduating from high school with the idea that knowledge is the ability to guess from a narrow menu of options. Knowledge, in fact, is thoughtful, spontaneous, creative and requires critical application, and practice.

Young writers often believe they must either express knowledge or be creative, but that they can't do both. Worse still —especially if you have to grade the work of college writers— they tend to be convinced that a non-creative piece of writing can't be made better by thoughtful, inventive phrasing. Worse still, there is a tendency to go the other way, to assume that what seems to the writer to be an inventive turn of phrase stands in for the need to express knowledge.

The key, of course, is that all good writing requires thinking that is both creative and critical, and which is informed by a wide range of informational sources. Hyper-specialization makes for narrower views and reduced vocabulary; hyper-generalization makes for vague assertions and lack of specificity.

Good writing benefits from a good dose of both tendencies, and a judicious mind that applies creative instincts to fashion language that says many things clearly, without deviating from a core purpose, and without obscuring the individual talents of the writer. This critical creative thinking is genuinely useful to writing fiction, poetry, essays, or analytical texts; it just needs to be applied differently, depending on the content and the aims of the writing.

And non-writers can learn from this idea: what we learn in school is not always how to think. It is often the idea that critical creative thinking is taboo, that it can cause us to overlook the obvious, or that it will only get in the way, as overtaxed instructors labor to deliver testable information to oversized classes.

What is sometimes visible at the university level is that there is a coordination between the tendency to take mental shortcuts and the process by which many students believe writing is supposed to happen. Something in their training may have hindered their willingness to give the full weight of their attention to the process of translating thoughts into words.

This is not to say they don't think, or that they don't do so with talent and aplomb. Rather, they think, but they also skip over vital connective tissues in the organic landscape of their thinking.

Whatever the cause, whatever the reason, this undermines their humanity and deprives our wider culture of the best expression of what makes good thought happen. There has to be an element of personalized critical creative thinking in any expression of complex ideas, or the full expression of those ideas will likely fail to come through.

It is a common complaint that we need to reverse the perceived trend in our culture away from critical thinking and informed engagement with the realm of ideas. Certain tendencies in the way we treat developing minds leads them to put thoughtful knowledge, creative thinking and informed engagement with ideas, into separate categories, one or more of which many people will simply view as the province of others.

We need to remember that intangible qualities are not without value; we need to remember that intangible qualities are sometimes more significant in terms of their impact on our environment than all the material calculations on which we base decisions about exchange value.

The ability to apply critical creative thinking might not be easy to measure on scannable standardized tests, but it has significant value for the wider culture and for the future of our civilization. Simple geometric problems, multiple-choice questions or word puzzles, may require some element of this ability, but if they allow for only one positive outcome, and good minds could easily value very differently the nuanced weight of more than one of the options, they are not challenging enough to incentivize or to measure real critical creative thinking.

In fact, I would go as far as to say these shortcut exams are just that: shortcuts. And there are no shortcuts to developing a complete, well-rounded, forthright and agile human intellect.

If we want a future shaped by people who reason by applying critical creative thinking, supported by both a wide range of informational knowledge and a diverse array of practical experience, we need to allow our children the opportunity to develop those elements of their intellects.

If we cast aside that principle of full-bodied intellectual empowerment, in favor of drab, inflexible, unthought fact-testing, we will undermine that future. The arts, the sciences, knowledge of physical space, and complex reasoning, need to intermingle in the regular work of students as they develop their thinking and their talent for language, and we need to encourage teachers, mentors, coaches and parents, to do the complicated work of fostering such complex reasoning.

Nothing Justifies Extremist Rhetoric or Violent Threats

Sun, 9 Jan 2011 10:01:32 -0500

In the wake of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 19 other people, six of whom have already, tragically, died from their injuries, the national political establishment (media, pressure groups and elected officials) has turned its attention to the perils of extremist and vitriolic rhetoric. We are being asked to consider whether the use of metaphorical violence (putting Rep. Giffords in the crosshairs, which both Sarah Palin and her 2010 opponent did) leads to actual violence, and while direct responsibility is not being alleged, the ethical obligation to honor our democracy with civil discourse must be considered.

There is no question that specific individuals and specific organizations have very consistently ratcheted up the vitriol and hostility in our political rhetoric, for personal and partisan gain. Former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) yesterday repeated his criticism of the last year of his party's near religious commitment to extremist rhetorical distortions and misleading statements about Pres. Obama and the nature of the reform legislation he and the Democrats in Congress have passed.

He urged "even the staunchest Republicans" to have the integrity and the civility to say "We are all Democrats today, for Gabby". And while civility has been the watchword, and we have heard outraged disdain for the shooter and for anyone who believes this kind of action is legitimate, in concept or in action, political strategists have already begun seeking to defend individual politicians and specific conservative groups against the rhetorical "attack" that their rhetoric has been too violent and extreme.

So let's say it clearly and resoundingly, and let's all say it defiantly, together: THERE IS NO CIRCUMSTANCE IN WHICH VITRIOLIC DISTORTIONS OR HATE-SPEECH ARE JUSTIFIABLE; THERE IS NO CIRCUMSTANCE IN WHICH THREATS OF VIOLENCE, METAPHORICAL OR LITERAL ARE EXCUSABLE.

People who have ideas and a will to serve have no time and no use for such disgusting distortions, and people of conscience know this. However heated political debate may become, metaphor ceases to be useful when it becomes outright distortion. Some politicians have chosen to view extremist distortions as politically expedient, even openly calling for armed rebellion, to capitalize on populist anger and anti-establishment feeling. But that political expediency comes with a cost.

One election may be easier to win if such ideas spread at the right pace over the right landscape, but the landscape will then become a distorted form of what we once hoped were its best aspirations, possibly in dangerous ways. False claims can turn out to hurt those who make them, when the fact that they were false finally gets through to the people whose votes decide the shape and direction of government.

To honor the principled, and always civil service of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and the tragic sacrifice of her community outreach director Gabe Zimmerman, federal district Judge John Roll, 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green and the other victims of this disgusting atrocity, let's commit ourselves to marginalizing any public figure who uses lies, distortions, hate-speech, or the language of incitement, to defame his or her opponents and to manipulate the American people. Their actions are a stain on our democracy and a perversion or our country's great spirit.

Let's commit to being principled and coherent in our devotion to building a more perfect civil order, a system of debate and idea-sharing aimed at constructing pragmatic responses to real-world problems. Let's commit to being better than any ideology, better than any tribalist camp, better than any Balkanizing defamation, better than the sordid temptations of internecine conflict that threaten to undermine the meaning and the quality of public service to an open democracy.