Geek Heresy (31 page)

I believe there are signs that some strata of the world are already headed this way. In the United States, for example, the rate of charitable giving and volunteering is near all-time highs despite a small dip since the recession. There are over 1.5 million nonprofit organizations today, and each year, about 50,000 new ones are formed.
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In 2011, 27 percent of American adults contributed 15.2 billion hours of volunteer time for various causes, a historical high.
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Total charitable giving in 2013 was $335 billion, near the peak reached in 2007 just before the recession hit.
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These trends seem especially strong among younger Americans. In 2013, the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, surveyed students and found that 71.8 percent of freshmen felt that “helping others” was an important part of life, the highest rate recorded since the late 1980s.
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Frank Luntz, “the Nostradamus of pollsters,” noted that “the 2020 Generation wants to do good as they do well.”
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Many of these students are children of
well-to-do Gen-X’ers who grew up in a world that was not only financially secure but able to offer a certain amount of social status and self-actualization as a given.
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Their parents were already engaged in jobs they loved, so, just as a previous generation assumed that financial security was assured, this generation assumes that a satisfying occupation is assured. What they’re sensing now might be the early aspirations for self-transcendence.

David Bornstein, author of
How to Change the World
, cited similar trends elsewhere: Most of the 20,000 nongovernmental organizations operating in Bangladesh were begun in the past quarter century. France saw an average of 70,000 citizen groups established each year throughout the 1990s. During the same period, Brazil saw a 60 percent increase in the number of registered citizen groups. In that decade, the number of international citizen organizations grew from 6,000 to 26,000.
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Lester Salamon and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University found that “a major upsurge of organized, private, voluntary and nonprofit activity has been under way around the world for the past thirty years or more.”
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Some countries go further, making charitable goals central features of state policy. Sweden and Norway lead the world in official development assistance, with both countries providing over 1 percent of their gross national income. They are followed closely by Luxembourg, Denmark, and the Netherlands.
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The same set of countries is at the top in terms of humanitarian aid contributions per citizen, with Luxembourg coming in at $114 per citizen per year in 2008, and Norway, Sweden, Ireland, and Denmark following.
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It’s no accident that these countries all register very high on both secular-rational and self-expression values in the World Values Survey. Perhaps they’ve saturated those scales and are moving into a more compassionate dimension.

I don’t mean to suggest that any significant part of the world is transcending into some sage-like state of pure altruism.
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Foreign aid programs have plenty of problems. And the desire for glory through activism can be just as strong as that for glory through wealth. Many activists put on a mantle of public service but still seek recognition or hero status.
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There are, however, hopeful signs. The recent rise of the
creative class in the developed world is something never before seen. Gender disparities around the world are shrinking. And as psychologist Steven Pinker cataloged in his tour de force
The Better Angels of Our Nature
, rates of human violence have fallen across the long run of civilization.
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That more and more people are shifting their concerns to something other than corporate climbing, Wall Street riches, and selfish esteem suggests the dawn of a new aspiration.

Further growth is possible, but it’s not assured. It’s not clear that a broadly compassionate world could ever be a reality. Modern global civilization seems stuck in a form of self-actualization marked by consumption and personal achievement. But while a self-transcendent world is not a sure thing, it is something to work toward. It’s a dream worth believing in, a possible self-fulfilling prophecy, and a brighter aspiration for our future.

CHAPTER 10

Nurturing Change

Mentorship as a Social-Cause Paradigm

M
y parents were relaxed about academic achievement, but the “tiger mother” in them roared when it came to my learning the piano. They started me on lessons when I was five and didn’t let me quit until I left home for college. I hated to practice, but my mother forced me to spend an hour a day at the piano – more in the days leading up to recitals or competitions.
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She would accompany me to piano lessons. At home, she’d sit next to me, repeating my teacher’s instructions.

“You may never become a professional pianist,” my father said, “but you will learn useful things.” At the time, it sounded to me like adult mumbo-jumbo, but looking back, I realize he was right. Today I’m at best a clumsy pianist, but I gained much sitting at the keyboard. I learned how to practice complex skills, memorize pages of information, find pleasure even in tedious tasks (like scales), find a place for creativity in repetition, work alone and work with others, handle the anxiety of public performance, interweave intellect and emotion for aesthetic goals, and so on. And I learned perhaps the most valuable lesson of any good education: that so much of life is rooted in both skill and habit, and that almost everything can be learned with sufficient practice. Music, of course, is hardly the only way to learn these things. Others learn
similar lessons through sports, dance, visual arts, academics, computer programming – or any other pursuit that involves long-term training and engagement.

There are no shortcuts to mastery. There is no technology, no institution, no policy, no method that can turn a novice into a concert pianist overnight. Metronomes and tuners are important aids for learning. And technologies like radio and iPods allow you to “scale” music very easily, if merely playing it back is the goal. But you’d never call someone a musician just because they could flip the switch on a player piano. They have to be able to create music themselves. True virtuosity requires years of motivated effort.

If that’s true for an individual, what would it take to create a whole nation of concert musicians? Venezuela offers a clue. In the 1950s and 1960s, its two biggest cities, Caracas and Maracaibo, were home to a few professional orchestras. These elite groups were funded by Venezuelan oil, but almost all their members were European or North American. José Antonio Abreu, a petroleum economist who played piano and violin, was dismayed by the lack of opportunity for Venezuelan musicians, so in 1975 he called together several friends to start a youth orchestra. On the first day, just eleven people showed up in a garage. But they were united by passion, practiced all day, and then went home and recruited others. On the second day, there were twenty-five. On the third, forty-six.

Within a month, there was an orchestra of seventy-five members, some of whom could barely play their instruments. Abreu held rehearsals for up to twelve hours a day. He asked older musicians to mentor younger ones. And soon they were performing for government ministers and dignitaries, such as Mexican president Luis Echeverría Álvarez, who was so impressed that he invited them to perform in his country. Building on this early success, Abreu took the orchestra to festivals abroad. Quickly, it won international acclaim.
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Over time Abreu was joined by others who shared his vision. They established facilities across the country, typically in poorer neighborhoods. They secured funding from public sources: the Venezuelan government, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, UNICEF, and
others. The effort grew amid major political transitions. Today there are 285
núcleos
across Venezuela, where over 400,000 students spend much of their free time. They practice and rehearse, hoping to gain entry to one of the network’s thirty-one professional symphony orchestras.
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You can walk through barrios and hear the music of Bach and Mahler wafting through the air. The country has so embraced the phenomenon that in rural villages, families give their cows names like Mozart and Beethoven. The nation’s best musicians form the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, which has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and major venues in Berlin, London, Vienna, Tokyo, Beijing, and elsewhere. Rave reviews come in even from the most curmudgeonly critics. In 2009 the orchestra’s twenty-eight-year-old conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, was tapped to become music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic – a Venezuelan wunderkind heading one of the world’s top orchestras. He has been called “the next Leonard Bernstein.”

Abreu named his organization Fundación del Estado para el Sistema Nacional de las Orquestas Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela, or El Sistema for short. It’s not a system, though; it’s a social movement. El Sistema now includes a degree-granting conservatory, a network of academies devoted to specific instruments, courses in jazz and Venezuelan folk music, apprenticeships for luthiers, curricula for special-needs children, preschool classes, and even programs for new mothers and their babies. El Sistema groups have also branched out into about fifty other countries.

If you came across a country without music, you wouldn’t think that it could be turned into a musical paradise through any packaged intervention. Yes, you’d need technologies such as violins, and maybe MP3 players, too. You’d need spaces where groups could rehearse. You’d need funding and perhaps a law or mandate in support. But none of that would ensure practice or legislate virtuosity. No packaged intervention can make a society genuinely musical without something more – something dramatically more, like the single-minded devotion of capable leaders, public support and generous sponsors, a network of committed musicians and administrators, a horde of music-loving children nurtured one by one, a society rallying with encouragement – and all of it spanning generations.

So many of our ideas about packaged interventions would seem laughably one-dimensional if we saw social change less as fixing a broken machine, and more like the cultivation of an orchestra. Social progress requires a change in people, and that can take years before it manifests as measurable behavior.
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It’s an obvious story, but it’s also a story that’s increasingly overlooked, drowned out by the flashy noise of cheap, packaged, blingy quick fixes. Visible events, such as the Egyptian Revolution and the legalization of same-sex marriage in America, happen so quickly that it’s easy to delude ourselves into thinking they were made possible by Facebook or by a single law or ruling. But to think that these are momentary events without a long history is to think that a symphony is just a flash mob of random people who decided on a whim to pick up instruments and play a sequence of sounds just so. The reality, of course, is that every note played on stage resonates with years, if not decades, of individual, collective, and intergenerational effort. There are no technocratic shortcuts.

But if there are no shortcuts, what can those of us who want to contribute to social causes do? This final chapter offers ideas for fostering intrinsic growth in others. If technology and packaged interventions are amplifiers of human forces, then the most important question in a world already rich with technocratic devices is how to nurture intrinsic growth.

Of Geeks and Gurus

I sat transfixed by Jayshree Diggi, a radiant thirty-year-old woman. She represented about forty women from two self-help groups who sat on the cement floor of a nondescript square building in eastern Jharkhand. In rapid Hindi, she explained how Lonjo, her village, had begun to incorporate a superior method of rice growing, as taught in Digital Green’s videos. Diggi presented maps of the village and rattled off statistics about each family’s gains in rice yield. Though some of the women in the audience were twice Diggi’s age, they seemed to look up to her and to rally around her.

That was July 2011. Several of us from the board of Digital Green had come to Jharkhand to observe the staff’s work in rural India. We
wanted to understand our partnership with Pradan, a pioneering nongovernmental organization that works with about 350,000 families in seven of India’s poorest states. Their programs span agriculture and health care, infrastructure, and local governance, and partner communities see diverse outcomes. Some have doubled or tripled their incomes. Others have cleaner water and fewer illnesses. Some take pride in young leaders such as Diggi. Many have built working ties with local governments.
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Pradan strives to awaken poor rural communities in India to the possibility of their socioeconomic development.