The Examined Year: 2021

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy, we’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area,

Ray Briggs
continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy, and Josh directs the Philosophy and Literature initiative.

Josh Landy
Today, it’s a special edition of Philosophy Talk, The Examined Year 2021. We’re taking a look back at the philosophical significance of events and ideas that have shaped the last 12 months.

Ray Briggs
Because the unexamined year is not worth reviewing.

Josh Landy
So Ray, how many Zoom meetings did you attend this year?

Ray Briggs
I lost count back in April. This year, it was definitely a little easier workwise but it still wasn’t quite like the before times.

Josh Landy
Well, later in the show, we’ll think about the year and the post pandemic workplace with Georgetown philosopher Quill Kukla. Among other things, we’ll talk about how many of us will continue to work from home and what that’s going to mean for the human experience.

Ray Briggs
Being stuck in your house was one big thing this year. But at the other extreme, we had people going into space, regular civilians more than any time in the past. So we’ll also explore the year in space tourism, with Brian Green from Santa Clara University, author of space ethics.

Josh Landy
But arguably the most important event for Americans at least was the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. In many ways. The whole year has been shattered by the less than peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election.

Ray Briggs
In a moment, we’ll talk to our Stanford colleague and former Philosophy Talk co-host Debra Satz about the year and political insurrection. But first, let’s listen to some of the sounds of this fragile year in our democracy.

Donald Trump
We will stop the steal when you catch somebody in the fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.

Journalist #1
He is inciting violence against the government itself.

Journalist #2
There are still insurrectionists on the grounds of the Capitol, high fiving each other as you see there.

Journalist #3
I want people to remember how they feel watching these images of the United States Capitol being taken over.

Liz Cheney
One text Mr. Meadows received said, quote, “We are under siege. Is Trump going to say something?”

Donald Trump
I know how you feel, but go home and go home in peace.

Josh Landy
Sounds from a year of political insurrection.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Debra Satz. She’s a Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, where she is also Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. And of course, she’s a past co-host of this program. Debra, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Debra Satz
It’s nice to be back.

Josh Landy
So Debra, shortly before he passed away, our good friend and founder of Philosophy Talk Ken Taylor was working on a book called, “Farewell to the Republic we Once Dreamt Of.” Do you think it’s time for a farewell after January 6, and with the many in the Republican party are doubling down on the, you know, this fiction that the election was stolen? And these somewhat troubling authoritarian moves? What do you think?

Debra Satz
I’m not ready to say farewell yet to the Republic. But I do think our democracy like many around the world is under threat. You know, the threat stems from many sources, including the fact that so many people have been left out of the human and economic development of the last 25 years. But it is not an easy time for democratic institutions. I don’t think, you know, January 6, was a serious threat in the sense that I don’t think by itself, it could have led to the demise of democracy, but it was a symptom of an illness. And the worst aspects of the symptom are the fact that so many people view the assault on the Capitol through partisan lenses, as opposed to a basic assault on democratically elected representatives.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I guess my big question about democracy is about legitimacy. And to what degree does having a bunch of people, in my view, wrongly question the legitimacy of an election undermine, sort of the democracy we’re trying to build and like, how do you stop it from undermining it?

Debra Satz
Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think one thing we know from social science and from human experiences that, you know, institutions and like democratic institutions don’t survive by laws alone, but really depend in important ways on the quality and judgment of the members of those institutions. And to be committed to supporting democratic institutions is to be committed to supporting them, even when you are on the losing side. If people don’t maintain that attitude, democracy is in big trouble. And I think for many, many reasons, the sense of these “institutions are ours, and we’re all in it together” is an attitude that is in dramatic decline.

Ray Briggs
So you said you weren’t quite ready to say farewell to democracy? Where’s that hope coming from?

Debra Satz
So first, in the, you know, challenges to democracy in the wake of the 2020 election, you know, the courts basically dismissed every legislative attempt to overthrow the election results, right, more than 60 lawsuits were dismissed. So in that sense, the institutions held the professionals from state governments who certify elections, stood up and acted as professionals, regardless of party affiliation. That was a very important moment. There are really good people who are committed to the truth and to the institutions. You know, I think a lot of people have seen that the institutions have not worked that well, and are really committed to try and doing to do something. So they work for all of us.

Josh Landy
You, Debra, you have a lot more optimism than I do, I think, both to some extent about the causes of, of where we are, I mean, you haven’t spoken about demagoguery and the use of propaganda mechanisms like cable news shows, and Facebook and Twitter and so on, and also about where we’re headed. I mean, I, I think there’s a very serious chance that in 2024, maybe even earlier, we’re not going to be a functioning democracy anymore, partly because the good people that you’ve talked about have, in many cases been replaced. And many new laws have been passed to make it easier for elections to be stolen. You know, I wonder, are we living in a Weimar moment? And are we going to look back, you know, in 2024-25, and wonder, what more could we have done? You know, what are we going to look like to ourselves in the future, we’re going to look like people who stood up for democracy and did something or people who, who were a little complacent, perhaps, or even perhaps, inadvertently enabling it, what can we do now to make sure that, you know, we’ll have done everything we possibly could?

Debra Satz
So I mean, great question. Of course, I have no crystal ball on where we are. But I do think for people who are- who care about the survival of democratic institutions, it’s really important to be involved. You know, there are organizations working to ensure fair elections, to ensure that people are able to register to vote, that are working to ensure that candidates with different points of view can get a hearing. You know, I do think there are things we can do. I’m no-t I don’t mean to minimize that we’re in a moment of risk. I think we are, I don’t think we’re alone in that. I think around the world we’re seeing democracies under incredible pressure. I think institutions don’t work so well when a very small group of people basically can reap the spoils from the benefits of those institutions are meant to deliver. And, you know, part of what has been happening is, so many people have been left out of the progress that’s been made in the last 30 or 40 years, that they don’t have faith in the institutions anymore. I don’t mean to discount fake, you know, the fake news propaganda. But I also think people see in their own lives that a lot of the institutions have not been delivering for all of us in the way that they need to.

Ray Briggs
So one thing that kind of worries me, although I agree that our institutions have not been working for all of us is that I’m not sure I trust people’s opinions or ability to figure out where they are relative to like their advantage or disadvantage. So I think one thing that really bugs me about the January 6 insurrection is that, you know, these people think that they were disadvantaged because they were voting for Trump, and Trump didn’t win. But that’s not actually like, you’re not entitled to have your candidate win. Having your candidate not win is not the same as being disenfranchised by like gerrymandering. It’s not the same as being racially oppressed or like funneled into prisons. So I think I’m, I’m worried about sort of people feeling disempowered who are not disempowered in the most relevant ways. And like, how do I talk to people who are just wrong about their relative levels of power?

Debra Satz
Ray, you’re raising a lot of important issues. Of course, there are people who have misinformation. Trump did not win the election. That has been certified in nonpartisan commissions over and over again. So the people who think that the election was stolen, and therefore the democracy didn’t work, those people are wrong. They’re just wrong in this case. And, you know, an important piece of this is also that there are organizations and elites working very hard to make sure that people don’t understand all the facts. And that’s a challenging environment, we’re in a very, very challenging environment, where, you know, news has fragmented the ability of people to actually, you know, ascertain and wrestle with real facts, that’s a problem. And, you know, we’ve got to all get on the same page, even where we disagree, we, there are some things we all, you know, have in common that we can agree on, and we should be pushing forward on those.

Josh Landy
I just want to raise a kind of devil’s advocate question. You know, Plato’s Republic has kind of made a, I want to say, it’s like it never went away, but it’s happening on your wave of popularity. In part because of the way in which the character Socrates seems to point to some structural weaknesses of democracy, right, it’s very easy for democracy to be sort of taken advantage of by a demagogue by a would-be tyrant who could sort of capitalize on on the mob and, you know, in the service of personal gain. I personally don’t think that’s right. But But what’s the best argument against that against the thought that, well just look, just democracy intrinsically, is a weak form of government? It’s sort of bound to end up in tyranny?

Debra Satz
So I actually, I mean, there are problems with democracy. No question about that. But I actually think it has strengths that no dictatorship has. So one thing a dictatorship will have an incredibly hard time doing is gathering information. But we have all kinds of ways in a democracy to gather information, both decentralized ways and more centralized ways to learn and have knowledge created that no dictatorship can do. Also, dictatorships have really hard time motivating people, you know, and you have to spend a lot of money on policing. Now, unfortunately, a democracy that is in serious decline, like ours is, is also spending a lot of money on, you know, policing and coercion, which I think would be less of an issue if the democracy had actually been working for everybody.

Ray Briggs
Debra, thank you so much for joining us today.

Debra Satz
It was a pleasure. And I’ve talked myself into a more optimistic mood.

Ray Briggs
Our friend and colleague at Stanford, Debra Satz on the year in political insurrection.

Josh Landy
I have to admit, Ray, I’m still not super optimistic about the future. I mean, you’ve got states passing laws that allow them to overturn a legitimate result. Responsible election officials getting voted out, ever more radical gerrymandering with the blessing the Supreme Court, you got right-wing influences still spreading misinformation about the election in the insurrection, the Institute for Democracy in Electoral Assistance just called the USA a backsliding democracy. I think we’re in huge trouble.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I’m worried that you’re right, and I don’t think the solution can just be to reach out yet again to white working class voters. I mean, what could be better for them than a massive infrastructure bill? But I don’t see any signs of that changing anyone’s mind. All the assistance in the world isn’t gonna make a difference if we don’t address the issue of race.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, and we’re taking a philosophical look back at events and ideas that shaped the last 12 months. It’s The Examined Year 2021.

Ray Briggs
Coming up, has the pandemic left many of us in a new, potentially permanent state of limbo about where we work? And now that civilians are going into space, are we running out of room in the stars?

Josh Landy
At home, in the office, and onto outer space, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Welcome back to Philosophy Talk. It’s The Examined Year 2021. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re taking a philosophical look back at some of the big ideas and events of the past 12 months, because the unexamined year is not worth reviewing.

Josh Landy
2021 was the year that space tourism really… took off, if you pardon the pun.

Journalist
357 miles above Planet Earth, tonight, for everyday Americans in process of proving that space travel for the rest of us is possible.

Astronaut #1
Copy that, SpaceX. Welcome everybody to Crew Dragon Resilience.

Astronaut #2
We have been spending so much time in this capsule. This is the largest one ever flown in space, and the views, I have to say, are out of this world.

Journalist
Today we are flying cultural icon William Shatner.

William Shatner
You know, it’s mysterious, it’s galaxies. But what you see is BLACK. And what you see down there as light, and that’s the difference.

Journalist
Richard Branson, becoming the first person to fly to space aboard his own spaceship.

Josh Landy
But as more and more civilians head into space for reasons other than scientific exploration, what kinds of ethical challenges should we be worrying about?

Ray Briggs
We put that question and more to Brian Green, Director of Technology Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, and author of the book “Space Ethics.”

Brian Green
Well, there’s definitely the cost aspect of it, first of all. Getting into space is not cheap, it’s very expensive, and that money could be spent on other things. At the same time, of course, people have freedom to spend their money how they would like to. So I’m not sure that we should pass some sort of law against people spending their money on going into space. But of course, there’s also a lot of safety and risk issues, too. One of the things that is noticeable with some of the suborbital flights that have been happening is that the folks are not wearing pressure suits. This is something that was figured out early in the space programs, which is that if you’re not wearing a pressure suit, you’re in danger of course, of getting killed if your capsule loses any sort of atmosphere. And so that’s become a standard safety precaution for astronauts going into space. And this is something that these civilian flights are not doing yet. So we have to ask ourselves, are they really that much safer in terms of the capsule? Or are they taking an unnecessary risk by not wearing pressure suits?

Ray Briggs
I mean, one kind of response is, look, it’s their freedom to decide what risks they’re going to take and if they’re going to do things that I think are kind of ridiculous. Well, you know, their choice, I don’t really, shouldn’t really have a say, and what they should be doing with their own body is.

Brian Green
Yeah, so exactly, that’s one argument you can make, right? And you can say, you know, what, the first time there’s a big accident and a bunch of people die, then we’ll say, they made that choice. And it could, you know, make the entire industry look bad. So they’re they’re choosing not only as individuals, but as an industry to make these choices. And it could eventually, of course, not only affect people as individuals by killing them or otherwise injuring them, but also affect the entire industry looking badly.

Josh Landy
I think that’s the kind of worry I have, is the the worry at the level of the industry. Because we’re shifting, it seems to me, more and more away from these government sponsored agencies like NASA, and towards, you know, the increasing control of big corporations. And, you know, are these corporations going to respect the Outer Space Treaty? I mean, it’s nations that signed up to that, and then here are these corporations that are like too big to jail. So, is that a danger? Are we in danger of sort of leaving space open to kind of space pirates essentially?

Brian Green
So there are definitely a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, let’s put it that way. The Outer Space Treaty was written back in the 1960s. It has not been updated in that period of time. And since then, although there have been some other treaties tacked on to it like the Space Liability Treaty and things like that, but when it comes to corporations and non-governmental entities in space, they’re supposed to be policed by whoever their sending state is. So for example, SpaceX or Blue Origin, or those companies would be policed by the United States. But then the question is, are they actually going to do it? And I mean, if you- this is a, you know, fun fact, the Starlink User License Agreement, says that, you know, Mars is a free country, right? Mars is its own free country.

Ray Briggs
Wait, Mars is a country?

Brian Green
It’s its own free territory, right? This is in the Starlink User License Agreement, and that nobody else has jurisdiction over them. So, and of course, everybody looks at that and says, oh, this is a joke. However, it kind of makes a mockery of the law, right? I mean, this is kind of a deeper question here, right, which is that we have this Outer Space Treaty, which many, many nations have been following, for a long time. And now we’re just going to make fun of it, right. And by setting that up, by making a mockery of the law, you are setting up a system, which is potentially going to have a weakened rule of law, it’s going to be what, ruled by who? Whoever is the most powerful, whoever’s on site? And, you know, people are going to look at each other and say, whatever, I don’t care what you’re doing, from my nose to you.

Josh Landy
That’s a little scary and thinking of scary, another thing that happened this year was Russia, deliberately sort of testing, shooting down satellites to test that kind of anti satellite missile, which generate a whole ton of space debris. So I want to ask you about space debris, because there’s what like half a million pieces of space debris or something like that rotating at 17,000 miles an hour? What’s going on with that? And what can we do about it?

Brian Green
Yeah, the space debris issue is a huge issue. And the true answer is we don’t know how much space debris there is right, because we have a trackable number of pieces of space debris, which is a large number. But then there are all the pieces that are smaller than that all the way down to tiny little chips of paint. So this happens fairly regularly in orbit, things get hit with debris. And the bigger the piece of debris, the bigger the accident is. So when Russia shot down this satellite, they did not shoot it down at a very low altitude, which is something to be aware of, they shot it down at an altitude, it’s above this space station, above the International Space Station and the Chinese Space Station. And those pieces will gradually experience drag, and they will come down, and they’re gonna cross those lower orbits until they finally come out of orbit. And the more times this happens, the more orbits are going to become unusable. And eventually, if these things start crashing into each other, this can produce something called the Kessler syndrome, which is a debris cascade, where you get exponentially increasing amounts of debris that just grow and grow until, you know, eventually everything is destroyed [unintelligible] and you’re just surrounded by a debris ring. And if that happens, then we’re completely shut off from space.

Josh Landy
Now you’ve written about this in relation to the tragedy of the commons. So I wanted to ask you about that. Like, why is this a case of the tragedy of the commons?

Brian Green
It’s a tragedy of the commons, because orbits are a cheap place to dump stuff, right? Ultimately, this is what it comes down to, is that if you have stuff in orbit already, and it becomes derelict, it breaks, or you just get tired of it, it gets old technology, it’s not useful anymore. And you can just leave it there. There are places that are called graveyard orbits that you can move a satellite into. But if obviously, if your satellite is broken, or it’s run out of fuel, you can’t necessarily get it into that graveyard orbit. So then it just floats around wherever it got left. And it’s cheap to leave it there. At some point in the future, the cost benefit analysis is going to change on that because there’s going to be too much stuff in orbit. So we really have to ask ourselves, what is the balance point? And is there something we can do about this problem? Can we actually start cleaning it up? Of course, the answer is there are ways to start cleaning it up. But they’re expensive. And this introduces all sorts of hard questions in orbital economics, if you want to think of it that way, right? How do you how do you actually clean up the mess that you created in orbit when things are whizzing around at seven kilometers per second, or whatever speed they’re moving up there. And there are ways to do that. You can try to burn them up with lasers, you can try to deorbit them with rockets.

Josh Landy
Or you can have a garbage collecting robot, right?

Brian Green
Exactly. You can have garbage collecting robots, but of course any garbage collecting robot is also a weapon.

Josh Landy
And it too could get hit by something and then become a pile of debris itself. Right.

Ray Briggs
We can just send more garbage collecting robots! I don’t see what the problem is.

Brian Green
That’s right. Everything will work out if they just keep collecting each other.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s The Examined Year 2021, and we’re talking about the year in space ethics with Brian Green from Santa Clara University.

Ray Briggs
So I know it was kind of devil’s advocating that anybody should have the right to go into space whenever they want. But this debris thing seems kind of worrisome, because it means that if you go into space, you make it harder for the next person who goes into space. And so I guess there’s also this question of like, for their own safety, like, should we be sending human beings into space at all? I know that NASA has been moving toward satellites that are just remote controlled, rather than satellites that are flown by human beings, because you can learn just as much without risking somebody’s life.

Brian Green
Yeah, the whole issue of whether it should be people on these expeditions or whether it should just be robotic, is a huge question. Humans are not adapted to live in space, just put it very, very bluntly, right, we’re adapted to live on Earth, in an atmosphere, in a gravity field, with proper nutrition, oxygen, all these sorts of things we’re used to down here. If we’re taking those things with us in space, it makes the mission so much more complicated. However, if you want to do something, like put a settlement on the moon, or a settlement on Mars, then you have to send people through space, that’s not something you could do robotically, obviously. So that’s once again, kind of the trade off there. Some objectives require having people on a location and many objectives do not.

Ray Briggs
Is it something I should want to do, to put a human settlement on the moon or on Mars or somewhere else in outer space? Like, I’m worried about, like, what the consequences of actually setting up a colony elsewhere would be. So if your goal is that the human race survive, like probably it’s more promising than trying to preserve Earth, which is really depressing, but maybe true. But another goal I could have is that a lot of the currently existing or soon to exist humans survive and don’t suffer too much. So like, is there some value to our species that’s greater than the value of the individuals? And if I think no, like, should I even think that space colonization is a solution to any of Earth’s problems?

Brian Green
That’s an interesting question. There’s a, I think there’s a big difference between 99% of people dying and 100% of people dying. That’s the way I would phrase it. If 99% of people die, it’s an enormous, horrible, horrible, horrible tragedy, there’s no way to say that there’s anything good about that. But at least there’s that 10th of a percent left, who can carry on all of human culture and heritage, everything you know, from the past, it makes all of human history worth something at least if there’s still some people left. If, on the other hand, if 100% of people die, it is a horrible, horrible, horrible tragedy, and all of human history was worth nothing. There was all of that effort, everything that was ever done, has been destroyed. And who knows, you know, in both of these cases, there’s probably large destruction to the ecosystems on Earth, large amounts of animals and plants die, all these other terrible things happen too, but I think that there’s a significant ethical difference between the two of those in terms of, you know, really disrespecting our past, harming our ancestors, if our ancestors can be said to have any sorts of interests by making all of their work, everything that they did worth nothing.

Josh Landy
And I think you quote Hans Jonas, don’t you? Saying that, you know, humans are the locus where valuing resides. We mate for all we know, we may be the only creatures in the universe, that value. So all value is gonna go out of the entire universe if the human species ceases to exist?

Ray Briggs
That’s exactly right. And I think it’s wonderful that you, you mentioned Hans Jonas, because Hans Jonas is one of my favorite philosophers, and I think his imperative responsibility is something that is really, really important for us to think about. What the imperative responsibility says, we need to be responsible for ourselves exactly as you just said, because we’re the only ethically capable creatures that we know of. If we destroy ourselves, then ethics disappears from the universe. And we could say that perhaps dolphins, elephants, and other creatures do have some form of ethics, they certainly have a sense of justice that’s been discovered in a lot of scientific experimentation, that you can discover that they have a sense of fairness and even justice, however they don’t have philosophy podcasts, or they don’t have philosophy, radio shows.

Which is the pinnacle of human achievement.

Brian Green
So obviously, that is the pinnacle of human achievement.

Ray Briggs
I want to ask a question that’s related to this, in a little niche about one of my favorite pieces of speculative fiction. So the science fiction writer Stanislav Lem, who’s mostly famous for “Solaris” has this other novel called “Peace on Earth,” in which all of the nations send their weapons to the moon and set them up so that they competitively evolve with no intervention from the human being. And then sign a treaty that says nobody must get information from the moon because it could disturb the delicate balance of power of the humans.

That’s really interesting. I have not read that story. I’ve read some other stories by Stanislaw Lem. So I really like his stuff. But that’s, that’s an interesting one, right? If you’re setting up, you said he was these were evolving creatures?

Yeah, evolving weapons that compete with each other.

Brian Green
That sounds like a bad idea, is the way I would describe that.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so a spoiler for the end. What happens is that a virus that eats silicone destroys all of the weapons.

Brian Green
That could be a happy ending.

Josh Landy
Well, Brian, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Brian Green
Well, thank you so much for having me here. It’s been a pleasure.

Ray Briggs
Brian Green from Santa Clara University on the year in space ethics.

Josh Landy
Plenty to worry about in the coming years as our billionaire friends colonize the stars. Their 10 minutes in space emits as much carbon as you or I are going to produce in three years.

Ray Briggs
But on the upside, Stanford undergrad, Amber Yang, has just invented a computer program to keep track of all the space junk. So maybe we’re making some progress? You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s The Examined Year 2021.

Josh Landy
Coming up, now that many of us have adjusted to working from home, is it getting harder to separate work from our personal lives?

Ray Briggs
It’s the year in the post pandemic workplace, plus commentary Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Josh Landy
Welcome back. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. We’re taking a philosophical look at the past 12 months. It’s The Examined Year 2021.

Josh Landy
With vaccines widely available and a better overall understanding of COVID, many people who’ve been stuck at home went back to their workplace, but it still wasn’t quite a return to normal.

Speaker #1
So I’m going back to the office tomorrow, first time since March 13, 2020. I don’t have any pants that fit me because the only pants that I have worn or purchased in the last 15 and a half months have been ripped jeans.

Speaker #2
Haven’t been back to the office since the pandemic began. It was dusty. The rug was grungy, and I kept smelling something funky, then I realized it was my feet.

Speaker #3
Next week, for the first time of the year, we have to go back into the office just like a little bit. But I’m still kind of nervous about it. Because I haven’t had to be around people in a way. And I’m really mostly nervous about complimenting people, because I haven’t seen people in a while, especially men, because I’m gonna want to say something nice. Like, sir, you have a very beautiful smile. And I know by the time it gets to here to here, it’s just gonna come out, you have a pretty mouth.

Speaker #4
I can’t go back to the office. I’ve been doing Zoom meetings for months, when I need to fart, I just press mute mic. If I’m in an office, I’m about to blow you all away.

Josh Landy
So what is the future of the workplace?

Ray Briggs
Quill Kukla is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, and the author of “City Living: How Urban Spaces and Urban Dwellers Make One Another.” They spoke to us from Berlin.

Quill Kukla
I don’t think that we even know what the workplace is at the moment. The workplace is morphing into this very strange and still under development combination of our home space, and our original workplaces and the virtual space that we’ve created. I think many of us have not gone back 100% to working in our workplaces. We’re working in this weird combination of the two and one of the things that I think is really distinctive right now is that we’re not really sure what counts as a place for work. We’re not sure if our home spaces, our workspaces, and when they’re workspaces and how they’re workspaces. And we’re not sure what to do with ourselves when we get to work anymore, which tasks belong at home and which tasks belong to work. So I think we’re really negotiating what counts as a workplace at the moment.

Ray Briggs
So some of that sounds a little bit unpleasant. I know I’ve experienced it as unpleasant, sort of not knowing what the boundaries are around work anymore. I’m wondering if there any sort of notable upsides?

Quill Kukla
Well, I mean, I think we’ve discovered that a lot of the things that we needed to do together in person, we don’t, and that’s been wondering for accessibility, it’s often wonderful for people who have caregiving responsibilities. It’s better for the environment, I think a lot of us are, in some ways more comfortable in our home space. But I do think that we don’t really know exactly what we’re supposed to do with our bodies at the moment in either our home places or our workplaces. And so we’re having to reinvent how we move in space when we’re at work, how we express things to one another, like agreement, friendliness, collegiality. We’re having to learn how to read our students’ body language differently when they’re masked and their voices differently when they’re masked. And we’re needing to learn how to teach differently with our own bodies. That’s not exactly an upside, but it does leave a lot of room for creativity and reinvention and trying to create new etiquette from scratch, which is at least philosophically interesting, if nothing else.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so that’s a bit about the workplace. But we’ve also talked about how people are working from home, do you think that the home space has new creative potentials, like a thing that I really like about it is people’s kids just being an accepted part of the work day, and just being sort of, I think, a little bit more accepted that everybody has a personal life.

Quill Kukla
I don’t think we can overstate its importance, I think it’s a absolute seat change in how we think about the boundaries between the private and the public and the domestic and the workspace. And yes, it has lots of dangers to it, it means that work can invade our life in all sorts of ways, it means that we don’t have the carved out space to say no to either work obligations or domestic obligations, so we end up with more of both. But the blurring of the public private distinction here is, I think, super fascinating. As I remember, just a couple years before the pandemic, I’ve lost track of time, everything before the pandemic feels like another lifetime. But not very long before the pandemic, the entire world was beside itself over that scholar in Korea, who gave an interview and his kids walked behind him, as he was giving the interview. And it went totally viral. And everybody played it over and over again. And he became overnight famous. I mean, if you imagine that in 2001, it wouldn’t even be anything, it wouldn’t be something that registered as remotely interesting that that had happened, right? I mean, this was a completely different physical relationship between work and the background, home space behind work. And yeah, now we just take it for granted that everybody has a domestic embodied self, and they have children, or they have pets, or they have partners, or they have a refrigerator that suddenly starts beeping, or you know, whatever is going on in their home has become part of their work identity in this completely new way, which I think has really profound implications for how we think about ourselves as having a home self and having a work self.

Ray Briggs
Cool. I also want to ask about sort of less office-y jobs, which some people have like, I’ve got a friend who’s a delivery driver who has not done working from home, because that’s impossible, right? Like, how should we think about the impact of the pandemic on those jobs?

Quill Kukla
So I still think that there’s a profound impact on how we move through public and social space. I have a friend who works in landscaping, and he’s talking about the intricate kind of dance that goes on, as he and his co workers move from outdoor spaces to indoor spaces and back to outdoor spaces, you know, in an outdoor spaces, things are pretty close to pre pandemic normal, and they just go about their business, and then they move inside. And there’s this whole dance over, do we put our masks on? How do we stand? How do we move? A nice analogy is for those of us who were not too too young, when 911 happened, the way that we take it for granted now that there’s a different level of security when we go on an airplane. We just think differently about things like government buildings and moving through cities than we did before 9/11. A lot of that just didn’t change, even though it’s not got the same sort of conscious anxiety attached to it. So I mean, I expect that that’s the kind of traumatic extended impact that this is going to have. And yeah, I think it has downsides for sure. Just like the fallout from 9/11 had downsides for sure. It makes us fundamentally less trusting of our environment, it makes us fundamentally less trusting of the people around us. It makes us see them as potential threats in a way that is, at least potentially undermining of easy human connection. But I don’t think it’s always going to have the acuteness or the felt anxiety bound up with it than it does now. But yeah, I think it’s going to be a loss of a certain sort of fluidity and closeness, which is a shame. I mean, the other thing I think is not going to go away is that this fluid movement between public space and home space is not going to go away, and in a way that’s got huge benefits and makes things very accessible and easy to accommodate people’s needs comparatively. But yeah, it’s also alas, our public spaces and our social spaces are not what they used to be.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, it’s The Examined Year 2021. And we’re thinking about the year in the post pandemic workplace with Quill Kukla, from Georgetown University.

Ray Briggs
So Quill, I like this point about the boundaries between home space and workspace being more fluid. And I wonder if there’s an opportunity here to reduce the amount of commuting that people do? Both because like, social science research says that’s, that’s a real harm to happiness, having a long commute, and because like a lot of disabled people who maybe can’t get into their workplace, because it or the the route to it is not accessible, exactly have more opportunities to work.

Quill Kukla
Yeah, I mean, I hope, I think that that would be one of the most powerfully positive things to come out of all of this is that we recognize that it’s not some sort of absolute necessity for work getting done. And even for social interaction getting done, that we all be literally physically in the same place. Again, there’s lots of people who don’t have that luxury, and who didn’t have that luxury, even at the peak of the pandemic. On the other hand, it’s interesting from an urban development point of view, that a lot of people precisely because they don’t have to go into work as often, are moving farther from their workplaces and moving farther from the city core. Which means that the commutes when they happen might be longer, which is worse for mental health and worse for the environment. And it also has a really interesting impact on the formation of cities themselves, I think we can expect cities to become a lot more decentralized and for there to be a lot more urban sprawl. Because if people don’t need to be constantly close to their workplace, it gives them all sorts of motivation to buy cheaper land farther from the city or land that’s closer to their families, or whatever it may be. And so there’s a lot less centralization that we can expect to happen.

Josh Landy
I, for one, do not regret the days of, you know, driving to and from work to go to endless meetings, and I, you know, you make excellent points, not just about mental health, but about the environment and about accessibility. The only thing that gives me pause, or it’s like a, you know, a mild regret amongst this sort of sea of general optimism is about serendipity. Yeah, I feel like, you know, I keep thinking to myself, this, I could probably solve this problem, if I just ran into so and so. But you, but you never run into so and so you have to like, you know, schedule a meeting with so-so. Scheduling a meeting with someone very different from just having a quick word. Is that a big loss or a really a tiny loss?

Quill Kukla
Yeah, I think that feels like a big loss. Although, I wonder, just because we are such deeply social beings, what other forms of more spontaneous social interaction might develop over the next few years? You know, maybe we’ll spend more time on Discord randomly chatting with people over, ou know, I’m not sure exactly what that will look like. But I do wonder if we’re going to find other ways of gathering more spontaneously, that don’t necessarily mean going to this predetermined office space, which is designed specifically for that. I’m not sure, it’ll be interesting to see. I at the moment. I really miss that too, I have to say, but you know, there’s other forms of serendipity that have sprung up in their place that we never, already, that we never expected, right? Like, I think for those of us who have taught over Zoom, many of us were just totally delightfully surprised at the positive role of the chat function which allows this entire other form of subcommunication that intersects with the main communication but is also less formal and more spontaneous and can go off in other directions to happen simultaneously. And I mean, think about what a seachange that is just in virtue of the fact that it allows there to be two layers of communication happening simultaneously in a way that you can’t have if you’re just meeting face to face with somebody in a room. Right. So there’s been a whole bunch of spontaneity there. And I think our ability to come up with spontaneous ways to communicate is pretty unending, and we’ll just have to see what emerges.

Josh Landy
Well, that’s a wonderfully optimistic note to end on. Thank you so much for joining us today Quill.

Quill Kukla
Thank you.

Ray Briggs
Quill Kukla from Georgetown University. Joining us from Berlin to talk about the year in the post pandemic workplace,

Josh Landy
You can listen to extended versions of all of today’s conversations at our website, philosophytalk.org where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
Now, quick before the ball drops, it’s Ian Schoales, the Sixty-Second philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. After years of glum forecasts in 2021, we suddenly pulled out of Afghanistan and nobody saw it coming. Amazing! Biden was chided for the sloppy exit though Trump had promised the same. Twitter’s already gone back to Afghanistan, who? Yet Biden’s numbers keep slipping. And we find our disputed exceptionalism on the brink of a new, less forgiving Republic, a couple of complicated laws and good lawyers the way the framers intended. Oh, and liberty, so that this year. Charges pile up but Trump keeps skating. [Unintelligible] he’s actually run out of town and his followers will still follow, he might even run again. Even though he might still be president. Despite losing. This year I learned people will believe anything for two seconds, then they lose patience and blame cancel culture, depending on the particular liberty being strangled in its sleep. This year, the FBI investigated threats against school board members around critical race theory which nobody can describe exactly much less how you teach it to second graders in Idaho. Recently, a school board member in another locale was caught assembling a dossier on a parent. Defensive behavior by beleaguered bureaucrat or a sneak attack by the deep state? Conservatives view it at all as a war on the family. Mom doesn’t want you to teach your kids about Jim Crow. Let her write the curriculum and save your complaints for the budget cuts. This nation is no longer one nation, we’re now cranky bunches who only hear what they want to hear. Fox News sold us a paranoid dystopia so they could be the vanguard in a world of fake news. In 2021 we realized other newscasters don’t know how to deal with that. Is Hannity a colleague or a treasonous weasel? It’s hard to tell. In contrast, Biden’s big plan Build Back Better sounds like a name conservatives made up to make fun of it. But who was the laugh on? Conservatives do not have a sense of humor. Consider the comics are rare. When they occur, conservatives hug them so hard, they die. Is that what happened to Dave Chappelle? Sad story. Anyway, once more tornadoes in Kentucky drove home the dangers of climate change, but also became a tool to chide Rand Paul for his resistance to pedal disaster even as he asked for it. Others leap to his defense while tornadoes put on the jackboots and re-mark their calendars. Am I saying weather is a Nazi? No, but we should worry. About what? Well, the so called sedition of January 6, I guess. January 6 was both pathetic and scary. It’s come to light that Hannity and Laura Ingram texted Mark Meadows on January 6, saying, can you talk some sense into a guy? Even Trump Jr, who you think would have Dad’s phone number was urging Mark Meadows to make Dad tell everybody to go home. And then just hours later, Fox blamed it all on Antifa. I tell you, Trump’s gotta run out of juice eventually. He’s already incoherent, and so are we, so it’s worked out. But it can’t last. It’s all soap opera. Performative, to use a popular word from 2021. They all hate Kamala Harris now for no apparent reason. So all the left has left on their fiery side is AOC. If she’s scary, I don’t see how. Not like Lauren Gilbert, who patrolled the halls with an AR-15 if we let her. Like Kyle Rittenhouse looking to whack any tourist who doesn’t look like a seditionist. Kyle Rittenhouse changed everything. He is a real deal. He’s Billy the Kid come into town to put on his gun and lend support to the marshal. After the trial, Ted Cruz asked him to come work for him. What a real job you let down after the gunfighter okay corral. We don’t want a sad Kyle Rittenhouse. No, there’s so much unfairness. Whose Karen is being gored by all the unfairness? We used to ask lawyers to determine that sort of thing. And then Brittany is now free. That is not nonzero as [unintelligible] would say. And what is the law really, you got to give birth to Texas or go to jail. So now California says you don’t like abortions? Well, we don’t like machine guns. You are removed Supreme Court the new states rights. It’s not legal in this state. Try that one. And soon Delaware will be the only state in the Union where anything goes except gambling and of course, smoking except in designated areas. In conclusion, then 2021. Opioid lawsuits, bad meal service, toothless agreements, gas is too damn high, taking a fresh look at the flying saucer question, and once again, same old answers. Stupid and on fire 2021 stumbles off into the darkness. Hello 2022! I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2021.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from subscribers to our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed or misexpressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders,

Ray Briggs
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and gain access for our library of over 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy,

Ray Briggs
and I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Amanda Gorman
The new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.