 Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for coming to our panel on political correctness. I'm Molly Ball, a national political correspondent for Time Magazine. And we have a terrific lineup of panelists assembled here. Stephen Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard, author of many bestselling books, including the forthcoming Enlightenment Now, which argues sort of against the grain that things are actually getting better in the world in all kinds of ways. Parvati Santosh Kumar, who is based in Chicago, the director of network learning for Strive Together USA, which facilitates large-scale social change to advance opportunities in education and social mobility and is here as part of the Global Shapers program. Lonnie Bunch, the legendary historian and founder of the new Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, DC, which, if you've tried to get in, you know, is the hottest ticket in DC, still difficult to get in. But if you do manage to, just an incredible experience, this was a, I would say, lonely crusade that you waged for many, many years, a dream finally achieved to a spectacular effect, and it's also a beautiful building. And So Young Kang is based in Singapore and is here as a young global leader. She's the founder and CEO of Nobi, which is a mobile learning platform for enterprises focused on mobile micro-learning. So a very cool diverse array of perspectives, which is kind of the point of what we are talking about, right, is how people with diverse perspectives can communicate in this world rather than just tearing each other apart, which is a dynamic I'm very familiar with as a political reporter. So this idea of political correctness, you know, famously we have had on campuses, particularly in the United States, campus protest speakers being shouted down and uninvited. This, these have now become sort of buzzwords, microaggressions and trigger warnings. And these are real things, liberal professors that I know at universities all over the United States actually do sort of live in fear of their students and the microcontroversies that can turn into really toxic situations. And then you have provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, who have exploited this dynamic to become sort of, to deliberately provoke the so-called snowflakes and create these confrontations. And if you watch, for example, Fox News, you would think this is the leading problem facing America, the so-called censorship or the oppression of free speech by liberal academia. So, and I would argue that this dynamic reached its sort of absurd conclusion in the 2016 election, which actually pitted a social justice warrior, Hillary Clinton, against an internet troll, Donald Trump. So let's get into this. I wanna start with, we had a sort of perfect case study just this month that Steven was involved in, a social media controversy involving something you said on a panel, in fact. Maybe if we're lucky, we'll get one today. So Steven, can you tell this story in your own words and how it came to be that you were the subject of a headline on the Nazi Daily Stormer website that said, Harvard Jew Professor admits the alt-right is right about everything. Right, followed by a New York Times article called How Social Media Is Making Us Stupid. This is, there was a panel at Harvard University, excuse me, last fall, on the topic, did political correctness help elect Trump? Everyone on the panel argued that it did. And my own argument was that political correctness by treating certain facts as taboo helped stoke the alt-right by giving them the sense that there were truths that the academic establishment could not face up to. Therefore giving, and by alt-right, by the way, I don't mean torch carrying skinheads. I mean the highly educated, mostly men, often in tech who find each other on the internet, often highly literate, these are not knuckle dragging brutes of the kind that we saw in Charlottesville. So let me just wanna be clear of what I mean by the alt-right. I know they exist because I have seen them among students at Harvard University. They tend to stay under the radar because they know that they would be in professional jeopardy. But to people who say that there aren't any intelligent, literate people on the alt-right, I can testify that that is false. And what feeds them is the hidden knowledge that certain facts are just taboo in respectable intellectual circles and that only increases their own sense of agreement and superiority. Moreover, I think it stokes the most pernicious interpretations of a number of these facts, such as gender differences, such as differences between capitalist and communist countries, such as differences in statistics on crime among ethnic groups, where if those beliefs are allowed to fester in isolation, then people who are aware of them can come up with a most, can descend to the most toxic interpretations of them, whereas if they are out in the open, then they can be countered by arguments that put them in perspective and that don't allow them to become fodder for some of the toxic beliefs of the alt-right. So the talk that I gave was on how we're inadvertently feeding the alt-right and what we ought to do to try to starve them. And then this, the remarks when they were put on YouTube, were then doctored by some of these alt-right sites so that the parts where I said, well, they discovered these facts that are true or in the record was not followed by, but yes, but that they have this perverse interpretation of them. Then that led to a, once it was, there were some alt-right sites that use this doctored video to rather perversely argue that I was in favor of the alt-right movement that I absolutely loathe and which the point of my remarks being, what can we do to combat it? Then I became the target of internet trolls on the left saying, well, this shows that Pinker was sympathetic to the alt-right all along and he's shown his true colors. Fortunately, it was a controversy that was pretty much confined to social media and a number of excellent articles came out in the Times, in The Guardian, in a number of blogs setting the record straight, so I didn't even have to say anything about it. I'd much rather be kind of attacked by social media and defended by the mainstream media than the other way around. But it is a sign of how quickly even a kind of a meta discussion of the phenomenon of political correctness can be turned around by some of the political correctness police to further distort and mighty and indeed make debate stupider as The New York Times put it. So, but I guess the counter argument to the point that you were making would be, do we really need to be discussing whether the Nazis have a point or whether the arguments for racism have any legitimacy to them? I mean, in this day and age, ought there not be points of view that are taboo, that don't have a place in discussion? And do we to some extent legitimize those points of view when we engage with them? I mean, Lonnie, maybe I'll open this up to you because so much of your work is about presenting perspectives and points of view and history that perhaps the dominant culture would prefer not to engage with. So what do you think about this question? Well, I mean, I think that if you look at this notion of political correctness, it's an interesting evolution, right? It evolved from a way for people who were anonymous and voiceless to demand a freer and fairer country. And it's evolved into this weapon that allowed people to sort of tamp down the debates and discussions that are essential for a democracy. My notion is as reprehensible as, you know, the Ku Klux Klan is to me, I really feel strongly that we've got to find the space to allow those conversations to happen because I look back in the 1960s, there were few opportunities for African-Americans to raise the issues that were at the core of who they were. Suddenly, you're allowed to have Martin Luther King or Malcolm X or Muhammad Ali on campuses at the time when many of the university hierarchy said that's not the direction we wanna go. So I worry about saying there are certain things that are taboo. However, I feel strongly that debate and protest are at the heart of what we should be doing. So when in the National Museum of African-American History, for example, some from the alt-right left nooses to sort of talk about, to suggest that what we were doing was politically correct. And my notion was let us take those nooses, let us write about it in the op-eds, let us use them in the museum, and use them as points to basically argue that we need to understand our enemies, but we need to be able to contextualize it. And that's what I really try to do with my work. Well, and Stephen, as you mentioned, so much of this does take place on social media, on the internet, where, as you said, Lonnie, the empowering or the giving of a platform to so many people who previously might have been kept out by the gatekeepers of institutions is disturbing to people, perhaps, in power. So, Young, I'd like to hear your international perspective on this issue for one thing, but also as someone who works in social media and technology, whether you think that those are a force for good or evil in this regard. No, I think it's been really interesting, I think, especially with technology, social media, this whole topic of political correctness. So I'm actually American, so I'm Korean American from East Brooklyn, New York, and I moved to Singapore seven years ago. And I think now living in Singapore for seven years, what I'm realizing is I don't think I had as much freedom of speech as I thought I did in the US because of political correctness, because there are so many important topics that need to be discussed and debated, but are shut down and hushed because they are sensitive. And so what I realize, actually, even in terms of religious freedom, I find more religious freedom in Singapore oddly enough than I do in the US because you have mosques, churches, and temples all literally next to each other on the same street, and people are very free to talk about those things. So when you talk about social media, I think part of the challenge we have is that technology has unintentionally dehumanized people. And so what ends up happening is that your soundbite then equals you, the person, the character. Now if I have a relationship with Lani and we get to know each other and then we have a debate, I'm not gonna hate his guts because he's a different point of view than me because I know his person, and I think he's a good person, and I'll know the whole person versus just that soundbite totally taken out of context. So I think part of the challenge of social media and with Twitter and soundbites is that you don't have the person. It's not a human being that you're talking to. You're debating about a certain point or something taken in one context and then you actually make judgments. So my big, I guess worry is around how people are equating a point of view with the person and technology is actually fostering that. So I wonder if there's an opportunity to start, I don't know, to rethink how we engage with humans and understand that your point of view does not equal all of you. And I can disagree with you and it's okay. I can respectfully disagree and still like you as a human being where it's so difficult to do that today. Even when you know people, there's so many friendships that have been broken up because of different political views. 20 years of friendship, 30 years, that's absolutely ridiculous. Your views don't form who you are. And so I think with social media, it actually just compounds that. So then you have that kind of continuing and then it's overnight, right? Then you're a character. You've gone from a liberal minded person to an all right supporter because of one comment. And I mean, obviously you're not right. So it's just the craziness of I think all of that. And so Parv, I wanna ask you sort of the opposite question as someone who works on the ground with vulnerable populations. Is this a debate that's sort of, I think this often can feel to me like it's not a real problem, right? Or it's sort of a first world problem. And for people who are actually struggling with poverty and inequality, does this debate have any impact or is it somewhat divorced from their reality? Yeah, it's a really important question because this often to me feels like it's own form of work avoidance where people instead of actually addressing the root causes of inequities that exist in our country and actually talking about things like systemic oppression or institutional racism are talking about the words and the language we use instead of actually talking about the real issues. And so if we can instead get people to get past the debate about language and have conflict at the language level or at the personal conflict level and move to a place where we can actually identify what's the shared result we actually wanna achieve for our world and how can we actually work beyond our differences and work across lines of difference to get there. And that's the work that I do at Strive Together, a national organization where we're working in communities to help people across different sectors come together around common goals for ensuring that every kid has a path to economic mobility. And so instead of saying, instead of arguing about whether people of different sides of the political spectrum have different perspectives about whether every child can succeed, we kind of help people work through that and whether from places that are urban like Progressive Portland where people are talking about race and inequity very openly to places like rural overseen where it's not as talked about, we're coaching leaders through the process of actually working through having productive dialogue about this in a way that gets to action and results for kids and families on the ground as opposed to having a theoretical debate about what this is about. And if you are in the audience and you have a burning question that's eating you up inside feel free to wave frantically at me at any point but I do plan to open up for questions toward the last 15, 20 minutes. So be thinking of smart questions that are questions and not speeches when we get to that point. But yeah, Steven, you had something you wanted to say here. Just to actually exemplify my argument. Molly, the way you even kind of framed your first question I think is although you're obviously meeting to elicit discussion but it itself I think exemplifies the problem. You say well should we really be discussing whether Nazi opinions deserve to be debated? Now an example of the kind of point that I made that is often taboo in academia is whether the sexes differ, whether men are indistinguishable from women. And I'm gonna state as a fact, men and women aren't identical. There's a lot of scientific evidence that that's true. There's a lot of common sense evidence that's true. Very few women bosses emerge naked from the shower or masturbate in front of their male employees. I think that's a pretty robust sex difference. We know that some men, many men do. Now is that a Nazi opinion? If it is, to say that to acknowledge differences between men and women is a Nazi opinion. First of all it removes all credibility because it so defies both common sense and science. And also for impressionable young people who don't know any better. It's saying well geez I guess I'm a Nazi because I believe that. So part of my argument is that that kind of equation that certain beliefs for which there is an enormous amount of evidence are so taboo that we're going to call them Nazis, Nazi beliefs is only going to encourage young neo-Nazis or the alt-right more generally. So one of the many reasons that we should be mindful of excessive taboo and demonization of particular opinions is that it could backfire by both sapping the credibility of academia and journalism. If there are certain things that anyone with eyes can see are true but you're not allowed to say. And perversely emboldened exactly the kind of people that we want to marginalize. Okay but you work on a campus and one of the arguments that I've heard about this is that this is just college kids being dumb as college kids are want to do. And it doesn't, outside the borders of liberal academia, which has always been a punching bag for the right. This isn't a real thing. It's not just students, it's also professors. And in fact, the professors are often encouraging the students. The students do take their cues as to what they can get away with. And there's actually not so much professors but the student life administrators, the kind of middle management that's kind of taking over the university that is encouraging the suppression of speech and the conspicuous outrage. But the reason that it's not just college kids is that it casts into doubt the entire scientific and scholarly enterprise. So I'll give you an example. I do talk to influential people on the right who say things like, well, I know that all you scientists say that climate change is caused by human activity, but everyone knows that the academia is infected by political correctness. So why should we take that seriously? And the thing is that if they have a case in certain propositions where there really is squelching of debate, where there is demonization of people who are proposing quite reasonable hypotheses, it corrodes the credibility of the university institutions on the whole. And that's a second pernicious effect of political correctness together with encouraging the toxic elements of the alt-right. But of course the most obvious one is that if only certain hypotheses can be discussed, there's just no way that you can understand the world because no one a priori knows the truth. It's only by putting hypotheses out there and evaluating them that you could hope to increase your knowledge about the world. Yeah, Sam. Yeah, because I think part of, and I totally agree with you, because I think one of the challenges is just because we don't talk about it or allow it to be spoken, it doesn't mean that those beliefs don't exist. So what ends up happening is you could say, yeah, don't talk about your point of view because it actually, I detest your point of view. So then we just kind of stop the conversation. You're gonna go off and go develop your own point of view and go talk to people who feel the same as you and then we'll further polarize kind of different communities, which is exactly what we're seeing happen today. And it's not gonna change just because we don't allow people to talk about racism. It still exists. So I'd like to get to the root cause and allow people to talk about uncomfortable situations and be a little bit uncomfortable. I think we're so pressed on being happy, happy and comfortable all the time and smiling with people that deep inside I know have completely different views than I do. And I kind of would like a little bit more honesty and a little bit more integrity and authenticity to say, if you have a different point of view, like I'd love to hear it. Let's have a conversation. I will not attack you, please don't attack me and let's have an honest dialogue. One of the social experiments which I am actually planning to do, still planning to do it, is actually to apply to the Ku Klux Klan and to go in. And one day during all the selection I was going through and clicking the sites and then I happened to see an article. So of course Facebook is immediate. As soon as one like positive article comes off on the right, all of a sudden all my Facebook feeds are kind of all right. And so I clicked on and I went to the website and I actually went to their code of ethics. And why did I do that? I spent the weekend doing that because I want to understand what do they believe? What are they saying? That's so different from my point of view and how different, is it really that different? And what I was shocked to find is I said, I kind of understand what they're saying. And I understand why their appeal is so big, right? Because they're being kind of demonized. And so when you're demonized, you're a victim, you're kind of covered. I'm gonna go find people who are not gonna demonize me and who are gonna accept me for who I am. And then you start to kind of facilitate that. So I think it's really dangerous when we start to actually prohibit any kinds of speech. And I almost encourage people to be intentionally uncomfortable. How are we gonna stretch our minds if we combine or if we surround ourselves with people who think like us, who look like us, who dress like us? How do we grow? I think we grow from discomfort. Part of you wanted to- Yeah, I think part of the challenge with what you're talking about, right, is that people don't necessarily have the skill set to be able to have those uncomfortable conversations in a productive way. And so part of what we have an obligation to do as leaders is to help figure out how do we empower people to have conversations and get uncomfortable in a way that doesn't continue the polarization. And so particularly because there's such a tendency for people when they're having conversations, you're listening not necessarily to learn, but to win. And so to avoid this dichotomy of having people just having a conversation, to get listening only to say the next argument, but to actually get to a place where people can have real authentic conversation about what's actually behind your belief system, that's where we need to do. And so things like helping people understand how to slow down your cognitive process, like use the ladder of inference as a tool to say, well, what's behind that belief that you have? What's the data? What's the evidence? But to get that, you have to have the patience with people and people aren't necessarily always there, particularly in a social media context. But in some ways, it's really, in my mind, there's two big issues. One is the social media impact, right? The fact that what was once a ripple becomes a wave, becomes an ambulance as a result of social media. I think about when we opened the National Museum and I began to anticipate what I was gonna be attacked by, I was stunned that the biggest attack was social media from the right, attacking the museum about Clarence Thomas, arguing that the museum was run by left-wing historians. Well, that's true. But that the notion was that using that was a conscious decision to say, there's only a certain part of blackness that's acceptable and that black conservatives like Clarence Thomas aren't acceptable. And suddenly, the right, regardless of race, really used social media to attack the museum to attack its credibility on that. And what was so fascinating to me is that we would get hundreds of emails a day. And we had to really put in place a whole strategy to handle that, whereas it would have been a ripple that I would have handled with an op-ed. Suddenly, it was something that we had to plan a whole media strategy. So it means that even ideas that really aren't worthy of real long debate you have to address. The other issue for me, though, is that what I worry about most about not having these debates is the idea that the most important thing, I think, educators, whether they are on campus, in museums, can really do is help the public embrace ambiguity. I think in some ways, the notion of ambiguity, of not settling for simple answers to complex questions is really the key to a good democracy. And I would argue that that is the goal we should be striving for, and that often a lot of our debates around political correctness really allow us, as you said, to talk to people of like minds, to not have that debate and that ambiguity. In essence, what we're really asking for is for people to be comfortable with the tension that comes from sort of freedom of speech, but also the responsibility to listen. It is, though, easy to, I mean, your anecdote about the nooses is so chilling. And so many of these conflicts disproportionately affect the people who are already victims of systemic injustice. And it's easy to say we should all be made uncomfortable when the people who are being made uncomfortable are people being traumatized by having, you know, a noose put at their door, which feels a lot different, I think, if you're an 18-year-old college student on financial aid who's on a campus for the first time. Are we comforting the Nazis and afflicting people of color when we turn political correctness into the subject of debate like this? I don't think it's about accepting, right? So I think that that's maybe where I'll kind of disagree with kind of the way that it's being positioned. To allow someone to disagree or to create space and a safe space for people to have different points of view doesn't say, I agree or I approve what you're saying. I mean, the whole idea is that, for example, in the noose situation, which is absolutely horrible and it's, to take them away doesn't negate the fact that there are people who actually believe that, right? So you can, and so I think that even you have, you almost can use that to actually spark debate. Like for those people who send you the emails, like invite them to coffee. Like it'd be kind of cool to just invite them all into a room and have a cup, like can have coffee. And as human beings and just have conversations, why do you believe what you do? And it's like, it's that whole thing of asking questions and asking the why questions. So for me, like, I think a big part of this critical thinking, I think if we can develop and kind of encourage people to be really critical and they're thinking about everything, you know, how do we know what we know? Do we actually know what we know? Even our points of view right now, we're sitting in this room largely. I think I would assume most of us have probably similar points of view. Maybe I'm wrong, because if I am, I'd love to hear you ask a really different question, right? Because if we start to encourage each other to ask these critical questions, why? Where do you come from? And we can humanize the conversations. Then we start to actually separate just the what from the why. And I think part of the challenges, we debate at the what all the time. Short what's, what's, what's, what's, what's. But we don't get a sense of why they feel that way. And sometimes when you hear the stories of why they feel that way, it kind of changes actually the whole context of that conversation. You know, and I think for me in technology, you know, I run a mobile platform and part of what I've been doing actually is causing people to think. I don't think learning and education should be a passive experience. And part of my, I guess, hope for education and educators is actually, is what you do in the classroom, but then to use technology to do the same thing, we just teach people how to think. That's probably the most valuable thing that we can give to this generation and to society is the tools to be able to do that. But teaching people how to think doesn't mean that you accept the kind of racism that comes with the news. I mean, for me, the news was the opportunity to contextualize this, right? To talk about what this means, how it is a symbol of violence and hate, what is it meant historically, and really trying to illuminate that anybody who thinks that's a smart thing to do really is somebody that doesn't understand what it means. And so I guess for me, the notion is that while I wanna hear these different points of view, I wanna make sure that we attack them vigorously, that we really confront them and really use protest and use our own abilities to marshal social media to count them. Because I think that's really important. You know, I'm not asking for equal play. What I'm asking for is let us understand the debates, but let us make sure that we make the arguments that we make that counter some of the horrible racism, et cetera. Steve? Yeah, I think it's important that we realize that, well, the issue of political correctness is not about the right to leave newses at the Museum of African-American History. And I think, in fact, equating controversial arguments made with evidence and arguments in an academic context with leaving a noose is part of the problem. Leaving a noose, I'm not enough of a First Amendment expert to know whether that would be protected speech or whether it would be considered an intimidation or a threat which is not protected. That's really not what we're talking about. We're talking about, say, advancing hypotheses on why the homicide rate increased in the United States in the past two years and was it a result of police withdrawing from active policing? The kind of thing that Heaven McDonald was shouted out of the room for arguing. A data-driven, reasonable position might be right, might be wrong, we won't know until we examine it. That's not the same as leaving a noose. And I think the idea that any hypothesis that departs from a certain left-wing orthodoxy is like leaving a noose is part of the problem. That there has to be a range of opinions that are just, which are nowhere near intimidation, threats of violence, but that we have to allow into the arena if we're gonna figure out how the world works and if we're gonna preserve the credibility of journalism in academia. Do you get the sense that students have gotten more illiberal, less tolerant of other points of view? There are some data suggesting that, but on the other hand, in the 60s and 70s, students were pretty intolerant. There were no social media. There were protests against people like Richard Hernstein, even when he talked about pigeons because of his arguments about the heritability of intelligence. E.O. Wilson, also of Harvard, got picketed and shouted down and his classroom was invaded and someone threw a bucket of ice water over his head. I think at the Smithsonian, in fact. We're proud of that. Yeah. And in terms of Singapore, I mean, Singapore is certainly not a paradigm of free speech. You can be imprisoned for, most of our late night comedians would be in jail in Singapore. So even though I think social media can contribute to it, the idea that people who disagree with you are evil and are legitimate targets of intimidation, I think it's probably part of human nature. I think free speech is highly unintuitive. Everyone understands why there should be free speech for themselves. The idea that there should be free speech for people that you disagree with is a major accomplishment of the Enlightenment. It's one of the things that America should be proudest of. It's deeply unintuitive and it's constantly going to be pushing back against the conviction that we all have that where everything that we believe is obviously correct and obviously immoral and anyone who disagrees with us is obviously stupid and obviously evil. Social media amplify that but I think that's deep in human nature. Well, and social media in a lot of ways has just made people confront each other in ways that they otherwise wouldn't have to do in the real world. And sort of one of the arguments really of the alt-right is that humans are inherently tribal creatures who prefer to be around their own and it is, we have unnaturally forced diverse populations together which inevitably creates conflict. I mean, Parv, do you see a way forward in helping people coexist in a diverse society in a respectful way or does that just go against our grain as humans? Right, I think part of the mental model that needs to shift is that all conflict is bad in some senses, that part of this debate is that this is a byproduct of us becoming a more multicultural society that people have to figure out how do we behave with people who don't look exactly like ourselves? How do we create a culture of inclusion in our communities? And to do that, we have to help people manage that process and thinking about the opportunities that we have to help people work together and talk across lines of difference. They're creating convening spaces for that and because it is the way of the future, we're here and talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and what it offers and the possibilities and how we need to continue to, I feel like inclusion is coming up over and over again as a theme in many of the conversations that are happening here and so this is kind of an obligation that I see that we have and that we have to take action. No, it's really interesting. I just had a thought as you were sharing that we're talking about this topic, right? About listening and we're talking at a very intellectual level but actually why people get pissed is actually at a heart level. It's at a very emotional level and so I wonder, even in our dialogues, if we can connect with people at the heart level, we have much more of a chance of connecting with another human being and actually developing empathy. See, part of the challenge is that the starting point already is you have a different point of view than me so we're gonna figure out how we're gonna debate and actually win and prove you wrong in what that is and at that level, no one's gonna win. No one emerges actually as a winner. You start to intellectually kind of attack each other versus empathy and I think if we need a lot more empathy and so I think part of having different communities come together I think has to start with empathy and not with the head and so I think we're almost like in terms of the way that we're approaching it maybe needs to rethink the idea of political correctness. Maybe it's around political empathy, right? Or it's about how do we actually try to put ourselves in other people's shoes and try to walk and understand where they're coming from from a heart level? That is I think the closest thing we have to actually having respectful disagreements and respectful dialogue because if we see at this level the whole time you're already in your kind of in war mode and I'm gonna try to intellectually over intellectualize and basically intellectually beat you. The curiosity is, sorry. Yeah, go ahead, yeah. The curiosity is super important and I think what's also important is that people don't feel like you have to agree on everything to be able to work together because I think often what people believe is that we have to get past every disagreement and conflict before we can actually work productively together and instead we could actually as a society like move further towards our global goals if we instead put aside some of our differences and if you really ask those why questions like you're talking about, eventually you get to the same places in terms of what's good for humanity and so instead of trying to find agreement on every single thing, if you instead put aside some differences and work together towards a shared vision, you'll have a shot at actually making some progress. But I think the challenge then is where are the spaces that allow that to happen, right? And if you're not doing that on campuses, if you're not using museums and cultural sites to do that, where are they? And so I would argue that one of the most important things is in this debate around political correctness is to make sure we guarantee that there are spaces that we can bring these things together. Now I'm a museum guy, right? But I love the fact that all the statistics suggest that museums are one of the most trusted things in the world, not just in the United States. And so what I expect museums to do is seize their political opportunity to be these spaces that allow us not to find simple answers, maybe not even to find common ground, but maybe to find common frameworks. And so that's what I worry about is where are those moments where we find those frameworks that allow the effective debates because we're never going to agree on all these issues. But I think that if we don't have those spaces, we suffer as a democracy. It's obviously just a total coincidence and not self-serving that you're advocating for more museums as the solution to this problem. But we're saying that. I agree, more museums, also more magazines. But so, and I am going to ask all of you to talk about concrete ways that you think we can move forward and find solutions to these problems. And then I'm going to open it up. So please be thinking about questions for the panel. But so, Jan, what do you think? You have talked a little bit, but particularly in the technology space, what do you think are some ways that we can advance mutual understanding and get past these political correctness, this toxicity? Yeah, I think technology can play a critical role because, and I think technology has a huge responsibility, actually. I wrote a piece, actually, for WEF called, Is Tech Ever Really Neutral? And I don't believe it's neutral. It's not just a platform. It was intentional design. So as someone who's building, has a mobile platform, I have, there's thousands of programs that people are creating. I do feel it's, I have a responsibility, my team has, and my company has a responsibility to understand what types of conversations and what types of programs are being created on our platform. But on our platform, one of the things that I was really intentional about was to develop critical thinking skills, creativity in the platform and collaboration. Because I don't want people to just have pat answers and also to take information passively. So what's happening is now, you kind of scroll, scroll, scroll down your Facebook feed, you read, read, read, and you have this false sense of knowing and understanding and it's actually not really true. And so almost going back to the Socratic method of actually asking the white questions, we actually do that on our platform. We actually say, you know, you've read this article, you've heard this thing. What do you think? What is your point of view? And we actually encourage that. And so I think the more we can use technology and the beauty of technology is you can do the same thing at scale. And the more, just by asking the questions, it's actually remarkable what happens, right? Neurologically, it's just by asking you why? It starts to shift the conversation. And so I think that's a critical part and if technology can be used not to tell and only tell, tell, tell or show, show, show, but to ask, I think that's actually ask, encourage and create a safe environment. I think at the end of the day, a lot of this actually starts with caring. Like if I don't care about your point of view, like no matter what you say, it actually really doesn't matter. Like if I don't care about you, like it doesn't matter if we can agree to disagree on even wanting to work together. Like I kind of have to care and wanna work with you first and then I'm willing to overcome the differences. And so there's something that a technology can be used to do that. I think that's actually really huge. And because we're talking about correctness and I'd love for us to use social media and technology to almost start a new movement, almost like anti-PC, maybe hashtag respectfully disagree, to actually create a safe space that says hashtag I respectfully disagree, but I like you as a human being but I wanna be clear that I just disagree with your points of view and this is why, right? To create safety. And it's almost like the combination of the human and the point of view versus the dehumanization which is a technology, it can be used both ways, right? So if we decide to use technology in a way to actually rehumanize, I think we can. And that's actually the power because it's just what we as humans put on it, right? And how we use it. So I think there can be more intentionality in order to really encourage respectful disagreements. Well, and Lana, you've talked about some of the difficulties, the controversies that attended the opening of the museum, but in general, do you feel it's been a positive story? I mean, the outpouring of attention and acceptance of the museum, has that been encouraging to you? It really has become that safe space where there are very few places, for example, where we cross racial lines, right? In this museum, 45 to 50% of the visitors are non-African-American. You find then these opportunities time and time again for people to come together around some of the most horrible things that we may show on the museum. But it gives people the sort of freedom to cross those lines and discuss. I find, I mean, I'm an optimistic historian, right? You know, I mean, come on. I grew up being called names that amaze me that I didn't punch everybody in the face. And what I'm struck by though, is a belief that looking at history tells us that it is not without struggle. It is not without loss. But boy, if people are willing to come together to take the risk, you change the country. And so I think that when I see people come together in the museum or throughout the Smithsonian, I'm optimistic in part, not Pollyannish, but optimistic because people are seeing relatively unvarnished truth. And they're taking that and saying, we can do better. We have done better. Parv, are you also an optimist? And where do you see progress in this area? Yeah, I would definitely classify myself as an impatient optimist here in thinking that we have made a lot of progress and we have a lot more work to do and we can't wait to continue working and accelerating the progress that has been made. And so I think personally we have an obligation to be lifelong learners and not just in our bubbles, right? And so how are we seeking opinions outside of ourselves and listening and learning and continuing to ask ourselves why and trying to avoid our own confirmation bias and confront our own implicit bias as well. And then as institutions I think we have an obligation to create those convening spaces not just for the sake of conversation but for the sake of action. And so setting ambitious targets for the social good you want to see in the world and then identifying who in your community or in the world needs to be involved at that table to make that happen. Not just the ones that you always agree with but everybody who has a contribution to play and then figure out how can we productively align these contributions in service of reaching that ambitious target. And Stephen, this debate having been percolating for several years and really in a lot of ways it's a flashback or an echo to the speech code debates of the 90s and even before that, have we figured it out yet? Have campuses and the broader public debate found ways to fix this? Do you see a way to fix it? I think the rationale for free speech has to be articulated. It can't just be a shibboleth, it can't just be a label for something that some people think is good, some people think is bad but as part of our educational system we have to remind people of why the principle of free speech was hard won, why it does go, the reason that we need it is that humans are highly fallible, most of the things we think are right, history will show to be wrong and that a lot of human progress was advanced when people voiced heterodox opinions in the face of opposition and that what we enjoy today is the result of politically incorrect opinions of yesterday. In particular, it's crucial that free speech not be allowed to become a right-wing issue and I think that is the biggest danger. Once it is, then we're really in trouble because people's beliefs are so determined by their political allegiance, by their tribalism, that if free speech becomes associated with a right then campuses and a lot of media will just abandon defending it. So I think we have to remind people of how restrictions on free speech, the political incorrectness of the past was often used by the right to suppress the left and that advances such as civil rights, such as the anti-war movement, crucially depended in their time on what used to be considered politically incorrect and that was only voiced because there was enough of a commitment to free speech that they could be expressed and then carry the day, say in the opposition to the war in Vietnam, opposition to Jim Crow laws and so on. Conversely, it is in societies that enforce their version of political correctness that you get dissented to totalitarianism, such as in Soviet Russia and Maoist China and Nazi Germany. They all began by criminalizing speech. That just has to be part of the knowledge of any educated person, has to be part of the conventional wisdom, not just that free speech is a good thing but why it's a good thing. And to your point about things getting better all the time, my parents attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 70s when there were literally bombings and people dying in campus protests. So this idea that just because some kids are marching around and are mad at the cafeteria food that this is a crisis, maybe it's not so bad. I'd love to throw it out to the audience. We'll start right here in front of you. If you can tell us, there's a microphone coming up. If you can tell us who you are and where you're from and then your question for the panel. Thank you very much. Paul Sheard from, I'm an economist, S&P, a global. Two things that always kind of sort of strike me as not being very productive and maybe, you know, pernicious was a word that was used is using labels, putting labels on people, putting people in boxes. People say something and automatically they're labeled something. That doesn't seem to be helpful. The other is this rush to judgment, 24 seven, you know, cable TV, social media, et cetera. That before we've had a chance to even understand what the context is, what the facts are, et cetera. People are out there making conclusions, putting people in boxes. How do we push back or, I mean, do you agree that those two things are actually quite pernicious and sort of how do we push back against those factors? Now the problem is putting people in boxes probably a pretty strong human heuristic and saying that I don't know, I need to think about this more. It doesn't exactly sell newspapers and attract eyeballs. But how do we push back on those? Selling newspapers, by the way, very important. But you know, a phrase, a buzzword we haven't used so far is identity politics, right? And this is also something that gets thrown around a lot. It's important for people to assert their identities, right? I mean, we have to allow people to do that without this rush to judgment. Would anybody like to take that one? I think, you know, a part of it actually is, you know, I think as influencers. We almost have, I think we have an obligation to actually humanize the conversation so that we're not part of the people who are actually progressing that and not jump to snap judges, but also sometimes to be a little bit complex. So for example, I'm a Korean American from New York. We're all good at math and there's all kinds of stereotypes that you can put against Korean Americans. I don't know what they are, but whatever they are. And so the more I actually can talk about things that are almost totally contrary to what people would stereotype and use my social media platform and use our kind of influence to actually start to change those narratives and tell more holistic, complex stories of people, I think the more difficult it becomes to actually box people in. So I think part of it from, you know, from the perspective of people at this forum is because we do have big audiences is to try to broaden the conversation as much as possible. And one of the things that I've started to do and I see a lot of my friends doing it as well is actually to humanize conversations on social media, especially on the web, to say things like I don't know or that, hey, that's a really good question. What do you think about that? And not having to be the smartest person in the room and requires a lot of confidence to do that because I think there is this knee jerk reaction to wanna be right and to have that kind of an answer. And so I think as leaders, that's part of leadership, to also be, I think it's actually more honest to be honest. We don't know the answers, we don't know all the answers and it's impossible even for this question and this debate to pretend that I have an answer or that any of us have the answer, it's a conversation. And so I think having the conversation is more important. And so I think we can facilitate that. It's hard though, it's hard, right? Well, and Stephen as a psychologist, I have to get your thoughts on the sort of human nature end of this equation, whether we are so hardwired to, can we see from outside the perspective of our identities or are we just inevitably, we're judgmental beings, right? We are judgmental beings, but I would disagree with the word inevitable and hardwired. Simply, I think that what it means is that it's always gonna be a struggle that we can never take free speech for granted because it does go against human nature. On the other hand, human nature also includes the ability to abstract away from things, to understand principles like free speech, to be reminded and persuaded about why they're good things. What it often will involve is even within each of ourselves to suppress certain instincts that bubble up as a first reaction, as the SNAP judgment and think, well gee, maybe I should think twice about my own conviction before I leap to an accusation. Maybe free speech or maybe just the ability to stand back and consider the other person's view. Gee, maybe I should apply to me too, not just to the other guy. So I think it will always be a struggle but I don't think it is that it's hopeless that the dark side of human nature will always win. Yeah, let's go over here. Second from the back, yes. I'm Dan from Puchli area. I'm a professor at Insiet Business School. So a lot of the things I hear at the panel talk about were political correctness between groups, right? So the academics versus the far right or the Americans versus the nationalities. What I'm concerned about is political correctness within groups and particularly at the moment with the Me Too movement within women. So in France we had a lot of women put forward a big newspaper article in Le Monde putting a different viewpoint across and they were totally slapped down by women saying we should all have the same opinion, we should all bring together. So I'm interested what you think we can do within groups to stop this issue of political correctness. Great question. Who would like to tackle that? Yeah? I think I'd say a profound question because one of the painful aspects of identity politics is paradoxically it can be a kind of racism and sexism by assuming that if you're a woman you must have a particular belief which kind of runs against the principle that the whole point of gender equity is that women or individuals have opinions, have arguments behind their opinions. Similarly to African Americans there is certainly a widespread tendency to assume that if you're African American you have a particular opinion. This is kind of factually incorrect obviously. And it is partly behind the I think unarticulated argument for the ideal of diversity where the justification for affirmative action policies has been recognized by the courts and that's been advanced by universities is we need a lot of diversity. Where diversity is defined by a bunch of different skin colors, a bunch of different ancestries. It kind of assumes that every person of a skin color has a particular opinion and that's the way you diversify opinion which is kind of perverse. Diversity on campus has often been ridiculed as people who look different but think alike. And certainly the principle that just because you're a Korean American or a woman or an African American or come from a Southern small town your opinions are predictable is one of the most undesirable features of identity politics. But it also really raises the issue of how within the group you handle your own debates and your own diversity. I mean I think there was a lot of struggle in the 1960s to not say there was an African American community but that there were many points of view. And that is something that within African American educational and political leadership we continue to wrestle with. That we consciously say that it's not a single monolithic group. And so I think some of that is incumbent upon the community itself to basically stand up and say, you know what, we're not all the same. Well but how did you end up handling the Clarence Thomas controversy or there was also one about Ben Carson, correct? How did you deal with figures like that in the museum? Well I mean I think that the notion of recognizing that nobody gets into a museum just because they're black, right? That in essence a museum explores intellectual questions and that we weren't looking at a history of the Supreme Court for example. If we were doing that we might look at then Clarence Thomas. But the reality was that there are certain decisions you make based on the scholarship and there was a decision not to go in that direction. You could make an argument that that was a mistake. But the reality was for me it was making sure I made clear that it's not a decision based on politics but based on scholarship. All right, I think we've got time for one, maybe two more, let's go to the front row right here. So building off of that Lonnie and then building off of the question about the Me Too movement. If you think about the egregious sexual violence that sparked the Me Too movement and you think about the nooses, right? That we found at the Smithsonian. My name's Molly, I work with Lonnie at the Smithsonian. One of my worries is that it's so hopefully for most of us it's so easy to be so against the noose and it's so easy to be so against the sexual violence that I worry as a woman that the Me Too movement is a shiny thing that allows us to get behind women in a way that doesn't actually get to the root cause of most of the social injustice with women, which is much more subtle, much more behind the scenes and frankly much more egregious and that affects much more of us than the ones that have been victimized so violently. And so I wonder how Lonnie for example, when you think about the noose, how do you use the noose or is there a way to use the noose or to use sexual violence in order to open up the conversation that's more difficult about kind of these really horrible ways that we are slighted in less obvious ways that maybe are no less damaging. I mean I think that the issue for me is as a historian how do you use these things to illuminate broader questions and that's what I think we tried to do with the noose. I think the reality is that I look at every one of these moments as the opportunity for me to educate, for me to explore and try to sort of illuminate all the dark corners, that's the best I can do. Yeah and I think the other thing that comes to mind for me is we often tend to focus on the individual events like the noose or the particular violent perpetrator and not ask about the patterns underneath that and really go below the surface and think about what are the structures in the system that are leading to these patterns that we can actually address and what are the mental models underneath that that we need to really change minds as a country and as a world and so having those conversations and helping push people below the surface is really critical. All right one more really quick question if somebody's got one. Let's stay in the front in the orange dress. I think you deserve a question for wearing that eye-catching dress. Thank you Christine Andreessen, family company Norway. I have maybe a provoking question and that is concerning political greatness here in Davos. Last year we had several complaints and I had a discussion with Norwegian investors after a conference the other day where it was African leaders about the immigration to Europe and European leaders and no one were touching like the elephant in the room the reason why, why are there no investments in Africa and I discussed this with Norwegians and it's cause corruption, lack of legal system to protect it but this team was not touched at all and as another example we have a prime minister who's been here for 20 years who's been on stage for 20 years and nothing is happening. The situation in Palestine is going the other way and still no one is kind of going in and saying well that's enough and why don't you do anything more? That is my question to you. What should we do in Davos to get back on track? Well, I'm gonna put this to Soyoung and Parve because you're the newcomers who have been brought in to bring new perspectives to Davos and to diversify what has often not been a particularly diverse gathering so what's your critique? Well, it's interesting because last year we had a situation within the young global leader community. This is not like you're recorded or whatever, right? Is this recorded? It is. It's recorded, okay. Too late now. Yeah, too late now. But there was a situation where actually there were a few very dissenting, strong dissenting voices and the community literally bashed and just totally bashed these few individuals for sharing opposing political views from the larger group and that actually raised a really interesting question because in a lot of the side dialogues people were kind of ranting and raving and then I kind of was like, well, isn't the purpose of this community that we should at least have enough safety and trust that we should be able to have these differing points of view? And so a code of conduct was actually created last year within our community to actually respectfully to allow for these kind of different points of view. So I think there is definitely hope. To the credit of the WEF and the YGL community, they did act and then they put a community of conduct. So then the last annual meeting we had to come and we all had to read the code of conduct and agree to disagree and to allow for constructive dialogue. So I do think that there is at least a model that the YGLs have started. I think the broader WEF community could also adopt because I have also experienced that. We tend to think alike and if you have a different point of view, anything sensitive, you're not allowed, it's taboo to speak about in this environment because of business reasons, after economic reasons and for many other reasons. I mean, let's, you know, it's business. It's not necessarily gonna get you an investment if you disagree with their points of view. And so I think we need to almost move beyond that because if this is meant to be an intellectual forum, it's hard though because you have individual people who may not be quite as enlightened and able to have those kind of conversations and may take it very emotionally, but if we can actually say it's okay. And that's kind of why I'm thinking, how do we create these codes or these words, almost as that starts off with, I'm about to respectfully disagree with you, right? And so you almost create that space so the person is almost kind of stopped because sometimes we don't realize it. We're not trying to be judgmental. We're not trying to attack another point of view. And so even in this community, how do we actually create that? I think it's really critical, especially with everything that's happening globally. I have hope because at least in our little community of, you know, I don't know a thousand people in the YGLs, we started to do that but it happened because a few people were so attacked that they just literally stopped talking. And that is the worst thing that can happen in a community like this. You know, you need to kind of pull them out. And I was last where? I'm from the global shapers community, really thinking about how we ask questions in these forums and I think this may be the only exception of a workshop that I've seen where there wasn't a question from a shaper. And so we have really been pushing to ask questions wherever possible and have a seat at the table and ask those questions. And the other thing I would point to is that we need to talk about session series that's happening at the loft. And those are really smaller discussion group forums where people are talking about issues that aren't as talked about in this forum. And so for WEF to continue to create that more in the mainstream and not just at the loft, right? And so going forward, how do we create that kind of environment in broader Davos and ensure that regardless of whether you're a political leader or a civic leader that you are able to have your perspectives questioned by on the stage like this? Well, we could certainly go on for another hour on this topic, but we're out of time. Thank you so much everyone for coming. Thanks for a great discussion. Thank you.