alan wells

Last night I finished reading The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. I’m humbled by Carl Sagan’s capacity for insight and clarity of thought. As someone with a strong background in science but an interest in spirituality, I enjoyed hearing the thoughts of Carl Sagan as he tried to reconcile his thoughts on religion with his expertise in the sciences. A few choice words from Carl:

On questioning the value of ancient tenets passed down through the generations:

“So I claim that there are very different ways of thinking for these two circumstances: when change is slow compared to a generation time and when change is fast compared to a generation time. There are different survival strategies. And I would also like to suggest that there has never been a moment in the history of the human species in which so much change has happened as in our time. In fact, it can be argued that in many respects there never will be a time when the change can be so rapid as it has been in our generation… Very major changes, and therefore not a circumstance where the wisdom of, say, the sixth century B.C. is necessarily relevant. It might be, but it might not be. And therefore, for this reason as well – for this reason especially – wisdom may lie not in simply the blind adherence to ancient tenets but in the vigorous and skeptical and creative imagination of a wide variety of alternatives.”

On the Earth as a lifeboat:

“When you look at Earth from space, it is striking. There are no national boundaries visible. They have been put there, like the equator and the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, by humans. The planet is real. The life on it is real, and the political separations that have placed the planet in danger are of human manufacture. They have not been handed down from Mount Sinai. All the beings on this little world are mutually dependent. It’s like living in a lifeboat. We breath the air that Russians have breathed, and Zambians and Tasmanians and people all over the planet. Whatever the causes that divide us, as I said before, it is clear that the Earth will be here a thousand or a million years from now. The question, the key question, the central question – in a certain sense the only question – is, will we?”

On why our planet is in conflict over ideologies:

“We kill each other, or threaten to kill each other, in part, I think, because we are afraid we might not ourselves know the truth, that someone else with a different doctrine might have a closer approximation to the truth. Our history is in part a battle to the death of inadequate myths. If I can’t convince you, I must kill you. That will change your mind. You are a threat to my version of the truth, especially the truth about who I am and what my nature is. The thought that I may have dedicated my life to a lie, that I might have accepted a conventional wisdom that no longer, if it ever did, corresponds to the external reality, that is a very painful realization. I will tend to resist it to the last. I will go to almost any lengths to prevent myself from seeing that the worldview I have dedicated my life to is inadequate. I’m putting this in personal terms so that I don’t say “you,” so that I’m not accusing anyone of an attitude, but you understand that this is not a mea culpa. I’m trying to describe a psychological dynamic that I think exists, and it’s important and worrisome.

“Instead of this, what we need is a honing of the skills of explication, of dialogue, of what used to be called logic and rhetoric and what used to be essential to every college education, a honing of the skills of compassion, which, just like intellectual abilities, need practice to be perfected. If we are to understand another’s belief, then we must also understand the deficiencies an inadequacies of our own. And those deficiencies and inadequacies are very major. This is true whichever political or ideological or ethnic or cultural tradition we come from. In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything?”

On the impression we give to the universe through our transmissions:

“Very nearby civilizations can detect our presence, and that is because television gets out. Not just television but radar. Radar and television get out. Most of AM radio, for example, doesn’t. So let’s just look at the television for a moment. Large-scale commercial television broadcasting on Earth begins when? In the late 1940s, mainly in the United States.

“So forty years ago there’s a spherical wave of radio signals that spreads out at the speed of light, getting bigger and bigger as time goes on. Every year it’s an additional light year away from the Earth. Now, lets say that it’s forty years later, so that expanding spherical wave front is forty light-years from Earth, containing the harbingers of a civilization newly arrived in the galaxy. And I don’t know if you know about 1940s television in the United States, but it would contain Howdy Doody and Milton Bearle and the Army-McCarthy Hearings and other signs of high intelligence on the planet Earth. So I’m sometimes asked, if there are so many intelligent beings in space, why haven’t they come. (I’m just joking.) But it’s a sobering fact that our mainly mindless television transmissions are our principal emissaries to the stars. There is an aspect of self-knowledge that this implies that I think would be very good for us to come to grips with.”

The last few weeks have seen lots of interesting things going on around me and in my head. Sometimes I’m afraid of forgetting the details of these things so I write them down, and then I can stop worrying about forgetting about them.

“There are things in this life I would rather not sacrifice…” – John Butler Trio. JBT has a new album out, and I’ve been listening to it almost every day. Great music matched with meaningful and current lyrics, and a political edge if you choose to listen that carefully. They’re playing at The Fillmore in June, I’m gonna get tickets for sure.

I’ve been feeling really optimistic about things in general lately. I feel like there’s a tipping point approaching for environmental and humanitarian concerns, that people are interested on genuine, positive interactions more than ever, and that people aren’t buying the bullshit of governments and major corporations. The disconnect that I feel betweent the marketing and advertising I see every day and the actions of my peers makes me hopeful that we may be the generation to really turn some things around and redefine this unsustainable system we’ve created. The fact that the most valuable information these days seems to be coming from person to person, very human and very personal interactions. Blogging, social networking, all of these things are building human capital in ways I know that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. I’ll admit that I might be biased in my perception of this because every project I’m doing for every class this quarter is focused on sustainability, but I still feel like that tide is turning, and its a very exciting time to be a young person about to leave college and enter the working world.

And then Virginia Tech happened. My heart goes out to all those people at VT. I just can’t reconcile this general optimistic feeling of growing goodwill and humanity with something like that, it completely upends the faith that I have in my generation to do great things with this world. I don’t know how to rationalize those two things. Maybe its just a fluke, but something we’re doing as a society is allowing these kinds of things to happen more often and with more bloodshed. How do you get around this? I have no answers here, its just so hard for me to understand that mindset of someone that does something like that… and it seems like it could happen at any school.

Last week I went to two events. On Sunday my parents took me to see the Dalai Lama speak in San Francisco. A great opportunity to see a very interesting man speak. He said a lot of things, some of which I think went over my head, but two things that he said stood out to me:

1) You can disagree with someone and still have respect for them. Disagreement combined with respect creates dialogue and through that conflicts can be resolved. Compassion is key to this interaction.

2) The idea of one “right” religion applies only at the individual level. Whatever religion, whatever god is right for someone is the one that fits them personally. The idea of a universally “right” religion is just not something that people should concern themselves with, much less kill eachother over.

3) People are generally good, and don’t want trouble. No one wakes up in the morning looking for trouble, and people want to be happy.

On Thursday, I went to a mini-conference at Stanford put on for their Creating Infections Action d.school class. The conference focused on a newly coined idea called social entrepreneurship; basically the idea of business for social good, not just bottom-line profits. I say newly coined because apparently people have been doing this for years but it was just recently given this name. The speakers were the founders from Kiva, GlobalGiving, and Benetech. The conference was one of the most interesting lectures I’ve gone to in a while and made me even more sure that the path I’m following with my own professional career is the right one. Just a few highlights/thoughts:

The GlobalGiving founders, former World Bank people, explained that they thought one of the problems/limitations with the world bank system is that it deals in huge quantities of dollars (hundreds of millions to billions), and deals directly with governments. Now, there are some things that you have to interface with governments to affect – taxes, trade laws, etc. But their point was that in many cases, the governments are not the best people to be distributing this aid. Their anecdotal story goes something like this: A government gets a huge sum of money from world bank, and they decide how to disperse it. 6 months to a year later, a bulldozer shows up in a village and starts building a school. The villagers stop the bulldozer and say, “What are you doing?” He says, “I’m building a school.” They say, “We don’t need a school, we’ve already got one that works well enough. What we really need is a new water well.” He says, “Thats too bad, because I have orders to build a new school, so that’s what’s going to happen.” The orders from higher up don’t necessarily reconcile with needs on a local level. To counter this problem, GlobalGiving fills the gap in the WorldBank system of local, smaller aid packages. This seems to be much more efficient, much faster, and ensures people get exactly what they need. Sounds like a great idea to me. Then, as a guiding principle for trying to effect change, it seems wise to try to work as locally as possible. Want to encourage education? Lets build schools and train teachers in the places they live, not make a top down command to make it happen. I’m sure people have been saying this for years, but the clarity with which I understand this point is new to me. The exciting thing about technology an the Internet is that it allows the global connection between highly specific, localized efforts. I think this is going to be on of the most exciting things to watch in the near future.

Kiva is an organization started by a current Stanford MBA student, and they connect lenders with borrowers for micro-loans. Their minimum loan is $25 dollars. Over that past 2 years they’ve raised $5.5 million in loans. And the great thing is that these aren’t donations – these loans get paid back in a fairly resonable time frame! To me, it seems like they pretty much just created $5.5 million dollars, and in the processs are helping to create a lot of local businesses that will sustain families and communities for years to come. It seems like all of this sucess is being driven by creating the connections between lenders and borrowers – people are much more excited to participate when they can see the face and here the story of the person they’re loaning to. Right now update come back on a monthly time scale, but if you combine this idea with the ideas presented by Ray Kurzweil that I’ve talked about before, and look down the road of mobile technology a few years, I forsee a time when lenders can get weekly, maybe even daily, picture and text updates about the progress of their borrowers. Great idea that’s accomplishing great things.

One common issue with these organizations that they can’t seem to get the high school and college demographics involved. Surprising, because we’re usually the first to adopt these kinds of internet-based communities and networks. I have a few ideas about why this might be:
1) Most of the people on the other end of these systems, on the receiving ends, seem to not be in the high school/college demographic either. I don’t go on facebook to connect with the 35-50 year olds that I know, so maybe I’d be more interesting in getting involved with an organization like Kiva if the people on the other end were my age or closer to my age – right now they seem mostly like middle aged/married with family types.

2) High school and college students are a powerful consumer demographic, and we spend money, but disposable income is still a very precious thing for us. As financially well of as many in my position are, we are MUCH less financially comfortable than even a college grad with their first job. Working full time, even if its only 30k/year, gives you much more freedom to give or loan $100 here or there (Kiva’s average loan is $92). In my exporations of career and living options for after college, I am absolutely amazed how many things are possible with a 50k/year job that were just completely out of reach in college. So how to get around this? Maybe a new system needs to be created – sort of like the facebook $1 gifts, where we can donate smaller amounts more often. Another idea – maybe the best way the college/high school demographic can contribute isn’t with money. What other skills do we have, what can we do that requires time and not money (we usually have more of the former and less of the latter). I’m not sure what form this would/could take, but I think there’s something worth exploring here. I think there’s an opportunity for partnerships with companies that sell to this demographic – something along the lines of the RED campaign, but maybe each purchase adds $1 or $5 to a cause?

Once upon a time I bombed a Stanford undergraduate application because I really didn’t want to fight the battle of explaining to my parents why I didn’t want to go there if I did get in. I still think it would have been the wrong place for me as an undergrad, and I wouldn’t trade my UC Davis education for anything, but the interesting stuff they have going on down there and the access to the resources of Silicon Valley makes me strongly consider that as my best option for grad school in a few years should I choose to go that route.

Well I’m in Sydney now, and I have tons of stuff to write about in regards to that, as well as address the topics that got left behind in my pre-departure craziness, but for now I want to relay something that happened to me today.

While sitting at a bus stop, waiting to catch a bus to the shopping center to buy sheets and a pillow, I ended up chatting with a woman in her late 70’s who turned out to be a Catholic nun from Ireland (she wasn’t dressed in a habit, otherwise I would have known this off the bat. obviously.) We were small-talking about the weather for a bit and then got into a pretty interesting conversation the touched on politics, young people, spirituality vs religion, global warming, finding your life’s work and passion, and the paradox of the existence of God in relation to evil in the world and free will (Her simple answer is that God gave us free will but we have to take responsibility for the use of it, and the irresponsible use of it is where the evil comes from).

The spirtuality vs religion bit was great, particularly because I consier myself a spiritual person but definitely not a religious person and I was a bit wary of revealing that to a Catholic nun. But it didn’t seem to bother her too much, and she said that she thought the difference between religion and spirtuality was that religion was just the daily steps and rituals, and that only does not make for spirtuality, that there has to be some deeper relationship for the religion and spirituality to become one feeling inside a person.

Although this is already an interesting encounter, to understand why this was a more meaningful thing than it might have otherwise been, you have to understand the context for me. I’ve been in Sydney for 6 days. I don’t know anybody here, its been pretty lonely, and I’ve really been questioning what I’m doing here and whether this is where I should be, in a personal and professional sense. I was trying to relate this feeling to Sister Anne, and her response to my dilemma was,

“Do you mind if I have a yarn with the Lord about you?”

And although I’m not a religious man and for the most part have trouble squaring with organized religion, that seemed like an offer I couldn’t refuse, particularly in my current state of inner turmoil and doubt in my direction. Soon after, the bus stopped and we went our separate ways.

Her departing words were, “I hope you come to the right choices.”

Something about the way she said that just hit me, as it seemed to address all the complexity and weight of the things I’m juggling right now. I walked away with a huge smile on my face and couldn’t help but think that sometimes the right people appear in our lives at just the right time.

Thanks, Sister Anne. You made my day. And I’ll be stopping by to see how that yarn with the Lord went…