Powerful Empathy Machine

Roger Ebert's remarks when he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Thursday, June 23, 2005:

When I started, I was asked, how long do you think you can remain a film critic? I said I should be able to hold out about five years. Now I’ve been film critic for 38 years and I think it's a worthy way to spend a lifetime, writing about films. They're not only entertainment. When they are entertainment that's not a bad thing, but sometimes they're more than entertainment.

We are born into a box of space and time. We are who and when and what we are and we're going to be that person until we die. But if we remain only that person, we will never grow and we will never change and things will never get better.

Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else's life for a while. I can walk in somebody else's shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.

This is a liberalizing influence on me. It gives me a broader mind. It helps me to join my family of men and women on this planet. It helps me to identify with them, so I'm not just stuck being myself, day after day.

The great movies enlarge us, they civilize us, they make us more decent people.

That's what I've tried to support and that's what a great many of the people in this audiences have tried to support especially the many filmmakers who are here, the film artists who are here, the filmgoers who are here. It makes a difference, and what's why we do it and that's why this is wonderful day for me.

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See also:

• Ebert, R. (2011). Life itself: A memoir. New York: Grand Central Pub. (library)
• Life Itself (film)
• "This is Not Only Your Film," by Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com, January 17, 2014  

Learn to See Humanity

Excerpt from "The Psychology behind Morality," an On Being conversation with Jonathan Haidt and Krista Tippett:

Ms. Tippett: Here’s something from your writing that — it’s a very striking statement. “The myth of pure evil,” — and again, religions are a place we talk about good and evil — “the myth of pure evil is the ultimate self-serving bias, the ultimate form of naive realism.” That’s a pretty strong statement.

Dr. Haidt: One thing that you find in most of the great wisdom traditions is the idea that reality as we see it is an illusion, it’s a veil, it blinds us, and enlightenment is taking down the veil, seeing things as they are, transcending dualities. And that, I think, is really crucial for thinking about civility, because that’s what happened to me in writing this book and in doing this research.

I was a self-righteous, conservative-hating, religion-hating, secular liberal. And, in doing this research over many years, and in forcing myself to watch FOX News as an anthropologist, with just, I’ve got to understand this stuff, over time, I realized, well, they’re not crazy. You know, these ideas make sense. They see things I didn’t see. The feeling of losing my anger was thrilling. It was really freeing. When you get people to actually understand each other, and they let down their guard, and they learn something new, and they see humanity in someone that they disliked or hated or demonized before. That’s really thrilling. And that, I think, is one of the most important emotional tools we have to foster civility. Because once you get it started, it’s kind of addictive.

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See also:

• Friendliness Resistance Training
• Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York: Pantheon Books. (library)
• Haidt, J. (2008, March). Jonathan Haidt: The moral roots of liberals and conservatives. (TEDTalks) 

Leadership is a Choice

"Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank. I know many people at the seniormost levels of organizations who are absolutely not leaders. They are authorities, and we do what they say because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organizationswho have no authority and they are absolutely leaders, and this is because they have chosen to look afterthe person to the left of them, and they have chosen to look after the person to the right of them. This is what a leader is."

~ Simon Sinek, from "Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe," TED Talk, March 2014 

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See also:

Sinek, S. (2014). Leaders eat last: Why some teams pull together and others don't. New York: Portfolio/Penguin. (Amazon, library)

Sinek, S. (2009). Start with why: How great leaders inspire everyone to take action. New York: Portfolio. (Amazon, library)

Some Unprotected Desire

Skybox Imaging HD Video of Burj Khalifa on April 9, 2014 (1080p) from Skybox Imaging on Vimeo.

Mergers and Acquisitions
by Edward Hirsch, from The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems

Beyond junk bonds and oil spills,
beyond the collapse of Savings and Loans,
beyond liquidations and options on futures,
beyond basket trading and expanding foreign markets,
the Dow Jones industrial average, the Standard
& Poor’s stock index, mutual funds, commodities,
beyond the rising tide of debits and credits,
opinion polls, falling currencies, the signs
for L. A. Gear and Coca Cola Classic,
the signs for U.S. Steel and General Motors,
hi-grade copper, municipal bonds, domestic sugar,
beyond fax it and collateral buildups,
beyond mergers and acquisitions, leveraged buyouts,
hostile takeovers, beyond the official policy
on inflation and the consensus on happiness,
beyond the national trends in buying and selling,
getting and spending, the market stalled
and the cost passed on to consumers,
beyond the statistical charts on prices,
there is something else that drives us, some
rage or hunger, some absence smoldering
like a childhood fever vaguely remembered
or half-perceived, some unprotected desire,
greed that is both wound and knife,
a failed grief, a lost radiance.

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See also: Alfred A. Knopf's Poem-a-Day 2014

Embodying the Ineffable

Grant Health and Fitness Center, January 28, 2014

VOICE/DATA
by Daron Larson 

An imaginary woman—
a voice that communicates
the impression of female
—invites me to enter my digits

She remains inordinately polite
in word choice and tone
regardless of my ability
to fulfill her desire for my data

I'm sorry
I didn't quite get that

I sense the presence
of a sophisticated algorithm  
calculating the odds of my legitimacy 

I am at her mercy

Please try again 

But she can't know 
I'm assessing her for fraud 
even as I'm being monitored
for virtual trespasses against her

Please stay on the line
Your call is important to us

There is much talk on screens these days
about computer programs evolving
human-like consciousness

Some predict its inevitability
based on laws governing exponential increase

We forget how difficult it remains
for us to accurately convey
the direct experience of loneliness 
     of connection
         of longing
             of grief 
               given the constraints of language

This is not limited to storage bandwidth or process speed
but speaks of the capacity for embodying the ineffable

I'm sorry
Please stay
Please?
You're important to me 
I'm so sorry 

I'm not afraid of the machines
we create in our own image

I'm afraid of our collective overlooking 
of the intangible sparks signaling our humanity