Reflections on the Curious Business of Being Human

– 1,830 words | 8 min average read time

At 78 years of age, I’ve reached the conclusion that the world will probably continue doing what the world has always done, with or without my supervision. Nevertheless, on an otherwise unremarkable Saturday afternoon in mid-October, I decided to conduct a little experiment.

I asked Artificial Intelligence a question.

“As a 78-year-old grandfather living in Northeast Ohio, what can I do to bring peace to the world?”

It was a perfectly sincere question, although I confess that my curiosity had considerably more to do with the answer than with any immediate intention of saving civilization.

The machine, however, took me seriously.

Very seriously.

It produced seven thoughtful recommendations. I should tell stories promoting peace, teach my grandchildren about compassion, organize conversations between people who disagree, speak against religious extremism, use music to encourage understanding, practice forgiveness and establish some sort of ongoing community initiative.

All excellent suggestions. The machine meant well.

And therein lies something worth considering. Nearly everyone, including machines, claim to want peace.

Politicians promise it. Religious leaders pray for it. Musicians sing about it. Beauty contestants have famously expressed their enthusiasm for it. Nations conduct wars in pursuit of it, sometimes killing astonishing numbers of people to demonstrate their commitment.

Peace, it seems, is among the most universally admired and inconsistently practiced virtues in human history.

The difficulty may be that we don’t all mean the same thing when we use the word.

For some, peace means freedom from violence. For others, it means justice. For still others, it means security, prosperity, independence or simply being left alone.

And, for a troubling number of us, peace appears to mean a world in which everyone else finally recognizes that we were right all along.

No wonder we’ve made so little progress.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to peace is not our capacity for hatred but our extraordinary affection for our own opinions.

We can tolerate almost anything except the possibility that someone who disagrees with us might have a legitimate point.

I have encountered people who would happily surrender their comfort, their money and sometimes their personal safety in defense of a conviction, but who would not surrender five minutes to consider whether that conviction might be mistaken.

I have occasionally been one of them.

Once we become completely certain that we are right, the people who disagree with us cease to be fellow human beings struggling with difficult questions. They become obstacles, enemies, fools or worse.

This is especially dangerous when our convictions acquire divine endorsement.

As a man who has spent a considerable portion of his life around religion, including some rather unfortunate expressions of it, I have observed that human beings are quite capable of transforming the God of infinite compassion into an enthusiastic supporter of their personal grievances.

Artificial intelligence, at least, has the courtesy to acknowledge uncertainty. Human intelligence isn’t always so accommodating.

There was something delightfully absurd about the conversation I had with the machine.

Here was a collection of mathematical processes, trained upon an enormous accumulation of human language, advising an elderly grandfather about kindness, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation.

But the machine had never held a frightened child. Never buried someone it loved. Never endured the betrayal of a trusted friend. Never experienced the terrible silence that follows an irreversible loss.

Yet it could produce a remarkably competent description of how human beings ought to treat one another.

I found myself wondering whether this was a tribute to artificial intelligence or an indictment of humanity.

After all, we’ve spent thousands of years developing philosophies, religions, governments, laws, educational institutions and elaborate systems of morality.

We’ve produced prophets, poets, philosophers, saints, reformers and an impressive assortment of people who have confidently explained precisely what’s wrong with everybody else.

And still we behave as though kindness were a complicated new technology for which nobody has written adequate instructions.

Now, we have invented machines capable of repeating our best advice back to us.

Perhaps we should listen.

The machine suggested that I write letters to my grandchildren, passing along whatever wisdom I have acquired over nearly eight decades.

This was perhaps its most sensible recommendation.

Grandfathers are expected to dispense wisdom. It’s one of the few remaining privileges of advanced age, along with complaining about the price of groceries and beginning stories with the phrase, “When I was your age….”

But what would I tell them?

That the world is becoming dangerous? It’s always been dangerous. That people are becoming selfish? Selfishness predates recorded history.

That politicians are dishonest, religion can be corrupted, wealth can distort character and human beings occasionally behave like complete idiots?

I suspect none of these observations would qualify as breaking news.

Perhaps I would tell them something less dramatic.

That most people are neither entirely good nor entirely evil. That a person’s worst decision is not necessarily the complete measure of their worth. That kindness requires less explanation than cruelty.

That forgiveness is not the same thing as excusing wrongdoing. That compassion need not require agreement.

And that being certain is not the same thing as being wise.

I might also tell them that they are under no obligation to repair the entire world. The world was broken long before they arrived and it will probably retain a few imperfections after they leave.

The responsibility of their generation will not be to achieve universal harmony. It will be to decide what kind of human beings they intend to become while living among other imperfect human beings.

That strikes me as a more manageable assignment.

But, when it’s all said and done, I wonder, do human beings actually want peace?

I’m not talking about some vague application of the word. Not the sentiment. Not the comforting image of children holding hands beneath a rainbow.

I mean the real thing.

Peace often requires compromise. It demands restraint. Sometimes it requires accepting an outcome we dislike, acknowledging the legitimacy of someone else’s suffering or surrendering the delicious satisfaction of revenge.

Peace may oblige us to live alongside people whose ideas we consider foolish, offensive or dangerous. It may even require us to acknowledge that our opponents possess some measure of truth.

And, sometimes genuine peace requires confronting injustice rather than quietly tolerating it. Outrage is easy to organize. Peace requires considerably more imagination.

At 78, I find myself increasingly reluctant to confuse pessimism with wisdom or optimism with innocence. I’ve seen too much genuine kindness to believe that humanity is hopeless.

I’ve also seen too much cruelty to believe that humanity can be redeemed by a sufficiently clever slogan.

We are complicated creatures. We love our children and occasionally neglect them. We preach forgiveness and preserve grudges for decades. We praise humility while secretly congratulating ourselves on possessing more of it than our neighbors. We long for freedom but sometimes become uncomfortable when other people exercise theirs.

None of this is particularly new.

We once argued about politics across the back yard fence or at the dinner table. Now we can insult complete strangers on another continent without leaving our chairs. Whether any of that has improved our ability to understand one another remains an open question.

Which brings me back to artificial intelligence.

When I asked the machine how I might bring peace to the world, it answered as though the question were a request for practical instructions.

So, the machine responded with kindness and competence. It encouraged me to use my remaining years constructively. It reminded me that small actions can have consequences far beyond their immediate circumstances. It suggested that my experience might be useful to younger generations.

There was nothing wrong with any of that but I suspect the most interesting part of our conversation was not the machine’s answer.

It was the question itself.

For thousands of years, human beings have asked how to establish peace, preserve peace, enforce peace, negotiate peace or try to bomb their way to peace.

We’ve created treaties, alliances, international organizations, religious movements and philosophical systems devoted to the proposition.

Yet, perhaps we continue asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking how we can bring peace to the world, perhaps we ought to ask: what is it about ourselves that makes peace so difficult to tolerate?

Why do we so often interpret disagreement as hostility? Why does another person’s dignity sometimes seem to threaten our own?

Why do we prefer the certainty of condemning others to the discomfort of understanding them?

Why are we more willing to sacrifice lives for our principles than to examine whether our principles have been properly understood?

These are not questions for which artificial intelligence can provide a convenient seven-step solution.

Neither, for that matter, can I. But they seem worth asking.

So, what can a 78-year-old grandfather in Northeast Ohio do to bring peace to the world?

Very little, if by peace we mean some grand transformation of human nature that persuades nations to disarm, politicians to become humble, religious zealots to embrace tolerance and everyone on social media to behave like reasonably civilized adults.

I suspect even artificial intelligence would regard that assignment as ambitious.

But perhaps the question was never about changing the entire world. Perhaps it was about recognizing that the world is composed of individual people, each contributing something to the human condition.

Some contribute compassion. Some contribute confusion. Some contribute remarkable achievements. Some contribute an astonishing amount of noise.

Most of us contribute a little bit of everything.

And perhaps peace, insofar as it is possible, begins not with the elimination of conflict but with the recognition that another human being doesn’t have to agree with us to deserve our humanity.

That isn’t a particularly revolutionary idea. It’s been expressed, in one form or another, for thousands of years.

We just haven’t become very good at putting it into practice.

As for me, I have no expectation of saving civilization. The world will be what it will be.

But if I can leave my grandchildren with a little more wisdom than I possessed at their age, a few worthwhile stories, some music worth remembering and the understanding that being right is never a license to be cruel, I suppose that would be contribution enough.

Joe Markko, author, musician and founder of Home Before Midnight Publishing

And if, somewhere along the way, I persuade one person to reconsider the humanity of someone they despise, perhaps I will have accomplished something worthwhile.

Not world peace, exactly, but a small improvement in the neighborhood. Which, considering the history of our species, might be a respectable beginning.

And should artificial intelligence someday figure out how to bring lasting peace to the world, I sincerely hope it lets me know.

I would be particularly interested in whether its solution involves getting everyone to agree on something.

Because if it does, I have some bad news for the machine.