Читать книгу Undercurrents - Steve Davis - Страница 8

Life is like the sea. Its tides and currents sometimes take a man to distant shores that he never dreamed existed.

—Jocelyn Murray, The English Pirate

I STARTED OUT as an unlikely candidate for global activism: a kid from a rural town of 4,000 people, most of them deeply conservative and proudly isolated from many of the comings and goings of the wider world. I grew up in the ranching community of Dillon, Montana, in a high mountain valley rimmed by stunning peaks running along the Continental Divide. There, the land and the water ruled supreme. So, like many boys in Dillon, by age 13 I had my first job: irrigating our fields of alfalfa and barley. This was in the early 1970s, before industrial‐grade sprinklers were widely available, so my Uncle Roy would plow the land, and then we'd walk it, surveying to determine its slope and where water might pool. Next, we'd dig a network of ditches to capture the water streaming from one of the valley's main creeks, and into these ditches I'd drop canvas dividers that worked like temporary dams, diverting the water into still more ditches and pushing it farther into our fields. The trick was getting adequate water to flow over the largest possible area without washing out and drowning our crops.

By high school I'd become quite good at “reading the water,” as Uncle Roy used to say, so for several years I was anointed “the Irrigator.” Old farmhands sometimes used the title with reverence, but mostly it came with a knowing smirk from family members, who knew this was about the only ranch job I could handle. Still, I loved those long, hot days in the fields, analyzing water. On summer evenings, I used the same skill (less successfully) for fly fishing in the blue ribbon streams of our valley, reading the currents to determine where best to cast my line—some place that would float it into the shallows where the fish fed, but not into an eddy where it could get caught. Later, after I had left our Montana valley and was rowing crew in college, I found myself again attuned to currents and how they could hasten or hinder our quest for speed.

This instinct persisted even when I was away from water. Reading currents—whether natural, social, or economic—and channeling them has shaped my path through life. Luckily, it's also intersected with my work in activism. Among the major undercurrents powering social change during the second half of the twentieth century, four have carried me forward: first, as a young scholar and activist immersed in Chinese history, politics, and culture, just as that country was transforming itself into a world power. Then, as a gay man and human rights lawyer, benefiting from 40 years of stunning progress in consciousness around LGBTQI rights. As the Information Age dawned, I was lucky enough to be tapped to lead Bill Gates's pioneering internet firm Corbis, which leveraged digital tools to overhaul media access to art and photography; and finally, I stepped up to lead the global health and development nonprofit PATH as the world made billion‐dollar commitments to achieve the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. These four macrotrends have acted like ocean swells through my life and career, ushering me along, just as a tidal current might push a boat safely to shore.

Though I've traveled far from my Montana roots, I treasure the foundation they provided. Even as a kid, I knew I'd won the parent lottery; my mom and dad generously shared their deep work ethic, intellectual curiosity, and unconditional love with their four children, large extended family, and community. Nevertheless, I'd already swallowed the bitter taste of outrage. I was an overweight, gay kid in a Brokeback Mountain town who hadn't yet come out. I often felt isolated and angry, convinced that I was cursed to a life of loneliness and sin. It took several painful years of living in the closet during college at Princeton University before I told my family and friends—with great awkwardness and fear—the truth of who I was. For me, the journey of coming out is never fully over, and I've spent much of my life channeling this early shame into personal, political, and community transformation, as you will see across the pages of this book.

Running parallel to this journey, a second powerful force was similarly shaping my sense of identity. After graduating from college, unsure of what to do with my degree in religious studies, I spent a year teaching in central Taiwan and became enamored of all things Chinese. It was a complicated love since I was intimidated by the language and unnerved by the authoritarian political regime, while mesmerized by the country's complex history and culture. I learned the language, savored its cuisine, found my first boyfriend, and built lifelong bonds in Taiwan and China. Despite my disagreement with some of China's political positions, particularly around human rights, I've been a Sinophile ever since.

These two social forces—the ascendance of China and momentum around gay rights—took root then, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and became powerful undercurrents that would propel my life and career for four decades. Not that I had the prescience to predict their world‐changing power at the time. Rather, I followed those currents because they spoke to my intellectual curiosity, appetite for challenge, and determination to be true to myself. Much of the momentum came from the sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time. But I did begin to recognize that these two movements represented watershed moments in history. These undercurrents also connected me with extraordinary communities of social changemakers who further shaped my work in activism.

By late 1980, I was back home in the United States, expecting to live briefly in a friend's basement apartment in Seattle until I could return to Asia. Then I met Bob, the man I would eventually marry (when we were finally allowed to, decades later). I remember telling him about my experience in the Thai refugee camp, the dignity and determination of the teenage soccer player who'd lost his parents, the humiliation and disappointment of the Hmong man tripped up by a trick question posed by an immigration official. I could barely articulate the dimensions of my outrage and confusion. But Bob sensed them, and he suggested I channel those emotions to work helping other refugees and asylum seekers. So I decided to stay in Seattle and landed a job in refugee resettlement. For the next several years I used whatever skills I possessed, along with a lot of youthful enthusiasm and self‐righteous zeal, to help find funding, provide services, and boost community support for Southeast Asian, Cuban, and African newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. It was my first full‐time job as an activist. The pay was about $600 per month. I was far from the frontlines and removed from policy discussions in Geneva and Washington, DC. But I was learning the messy nuts and bolts of practical activism—finding homes for families, signing up people for food stamps, processing applications for resettlement, and writing complaint letters about faulty programs and weak regulations. Most of all, this was where I began learning how to translate my outrage into longer‐term practical solutions and help others do the same.

I was still deeply interested in China, however, and a couple years later decided to pursue a master's degree in Chinese studies. Part of that program meant spending the summer of 1983 in China, in one of the first foreign student groups allowed to study there since the Cultural Revolution. We numbered about 40, all of us living together in a funky, old dorm at the edge of the Beijing University campus—a few Americans, a great guy from Japan who became my lifelong friend, a couple of Europeans, and about 20 North Koreans. Vestiges of the Cultural Revolution were still much in evidence, and they touched every part of our lives, including bleak cafeteria meals consisting of rice, cabbage, and eggplant—every single day. Many of us, accustomed to lots more protein, felt like we were starving.

Oddly, being a foreigner afforded me certain freedoms that ordinary Chinese could not enjoy, one of which was access to the few international hotels. Consequently, I regularly hopped the fence with my buddy from Japan, Seido—partly for joyriding on our cool Phoenix bicycles down the grand boulevards, partly to forage for protein. Together, we cruised through old neighborhoods and along mostly carless streets to one of the few tourist hotels in Beijing, heading straight to the bar—more for the peanuts than the beer. They were protein, after all, and we'd stealthily stuff our pockets, later presenting this bounty to our hungry colleagues back at the dorms, where we spread our loot across the beds like kids assessing Halloween candies. While I've never considered myself a rule‐breaker, I was, even then, a problem‐solver. And I've always enjoyed figuring out creative ways to get stuff done for my team.

After returning to the States, I changed course again: rather than seeking a doctorate in Chinese politics and an academic career, I doubled down on building my toolkit for social justice work and pivoted toward legal studies. An unusual dual‐focus program at Columbia University would combine my interests in international human rights and Chinese law, so, with more than a bit of hand‐wringing, Bob agreed to sell his construction business and move across the country with me for a new adventure. This was 10 years after the Stonewall demonstrations, and we envisioned ourselves heading toward some sort of gay Mecca where we'd be surrounded by like‐minded activist couples while I pursued my degree. At least, that was the plan.

New York, however, turned out to be different than we'd anticipated. Despite the city's reputation for wild liberalism, its gay community in the mid‐1980s remained ghettoized. Of the few gay students in my law classes, most were deeply closeted due to fears that being “out” might dash their prospects at the Wall Street firms where they hoped to work. Bob and I, meanwhile, had applied for married student housing. (By then, we'd been together for five years.) When we learned we “didn't qualify,” I found myself arguing with the law school dean on my very first day. He was a highly regarded constitutional lawyer but informed me that making the case for a male couple to get into married student housing would be “way too awkward” for the women in the campus housing office. Bob and I were packed off to a tiny room facing an air shaft, where we had to pull out our futon bed each night and roll it up again every morning. This went on for three years. Add in the everyday challenges of being an openly gay couple in the 1980s—when anti‐homosexual discrimination in housing, employment, healthcare, and military service were rife—and my sense of injustice was beginning to boil. Then came AIDS.

It is difficult to capture the swirl of terror and outrage I felt as this disease moved from a media story to a force claiming my classmates and acquaintances, one by one, particularly after Bob and I returned to Seattle after graduation. We became caretakers for dying friends, attended funerals of men in the prime of their lives, and lived in abject terror of the virus. I suddenly found myself—a studious kid from a conservative community—at street protests and gay rights parades. Marching channeled my rage, but it left me frustrated. Protesting was necessary but insufficient to produce the tangible outcomes, like funding for AIDS research or changes to insurance laws, that would improve the well‐being of our community.

This was the moment I began to appreciate the important difference between frontline demonstrations and deeper reform. It was also the dawning of my realization of the power in behind‐the‐scenes practical activism. Let me be clear: I am profoundly grateful that there were, and still are, people driven to speak up loudly for change. Even when strident or off‐putting (like the ACT‐UP protests at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York in 1989), public actions garner the attention of media and influencers, which is essential for pushing an issue onto broader public consciousness and, eventually, the agenda of policymakers. Indeed, considering the many harmful policies and the extraordinary affronts to our democratic systems today, I believe much more of this vocal activism is necessary to have any hope of leaving a better world to our children. Every tool matters, from advocacy efforts, to street marches, to effective social media campaigns (beyond merely sharing our outrage by “liking” a headline on Facebook).

But I knew even then that I was more effective as a behind‐the‐scenes strategist. Shaping policies (on anti‐discrimination and pro‐marriage laws); building alliances (with straight allies and the business community); designing programs (like Lambert House for gay and lesbian youth in Seattle); donating and raising money (for scores of LGBTQI college scholarships and LGBTQI rights organizations); or working on longer‐term systems change—these are the things that charge me up. The work of many activists across multiple platforms and generations laid the building blocks for each of those steps, paving the way for social change. We wouldn't have same‐sex marriage across the United States today without winning early legal fights to amend healthcare laws so that AIDS patients could be covered and their partners seen as family. Nor would Bob and I have been able to adopt our son without the underlying work of so many activists who fought to change family law and societal norms.

Thinking back to those years, I can hardly believe the dramatic changes generated by the undercurrents of gay activism and China's ascendance—complete transformations in just a few decades! The notion of legal same‐sex marriage was simply inconceivable to me as a young man when I first came out in Taiwan. The idea of China as a global superpower would have been impossible to reconcile with the poverty and isolation I saw in 1983 while traveling on third‐class “hard seats” through rural Shandong Province. And to have raised an adopted child from China who grew up the legal son of two dads belies anything I could have dreamed of as a young irrigator in Montana. Yet here we are. Change on a grand scale is possible, and it can happen relatively fast.

The third undercurrent of social evolution that I rode came largely from being in the right place at the right time and willing to leap into the unknown. With my graduate degree in hand, Bob and I returned to Seattle, where I worked in international law and he taught in low‐income elementary schools. But after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre dashed the hopes of many for a more democratic China, I pivoted from human rights to focus on another type of rights: intellectual property. Here we were, living in an emerging tech capital just as software was beginning to transform the world, and my law firm was merging with that of Bill Gates, Sr. (father to the Microsoft co‐founder). The next thing I knew, I had a front‐row seat to the digital revolution.

In 1993, I was recruited to work at Corbis, the groundbreaking startup founded by Bill Gates, the tech pioneer. It sounds old hat now, but Corbis was at the forefront of developing technology through which media companies could access and digitize millions of art and photography images. This meant we were also rethinking copyright law and business models; traveling the world to evangelize for this kind of broad access; and meeting with prominent figures in the worlds of art, photography, and technology. It was a heady and extraordinary opportunity, chock‐full of some remarkable achievements and many painful failures. We produced several award‐winning products and documentaries using these new technologies, developed cataloguing schemes and rights‐management tools, and built alliances between artists, technologists, and businesspeople. After a few years, I was tapped to become the CEO and led Corbis's expansion into a global firm. That time of my life could fill a whole separate book; suffice to say, the Digital Revolution opened my eyes to the power and possibilities in innovation and data. This new undercurrent would influence my activist agenda by making clear that world change would come through the deployment of new technologies, including what we then called the “information superhighway,” later known as the internet.

About 15 years ago, these three forces intersected with a fourth undercurrent that would shape the rest of my life and career to date. At the turn of the century—while I was head‐down running a pioneering internet company, worrying about Y2K, and wondering if people would ever use credit cards online—in New York City, every member state of the United Nations had endorsed eight Millennial Development Goals (MDGs). These were benchmarks that would measure global efforts to tackle poverty, improve health, and address inequity by 2015. I had no idea this was happening, but my then‐boss and friend Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, were part of it, alongside other philanthropists and political leaders. Under the enlightened leadership of UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, the MDGs would hasten a revolution in the fields of global development and social innovation.

I could not resist this. Such a powerful global movement presented a fertile field to till with the lessons I'd learned through a lifetime of work in leadership and social activism. So, in 2007, I left Corbis to return to promoting opportunities for impact at the intersection of innovation and social justice, becoming global director of social innovation at McKinsey & Company, where I worked on social sector projects worldwide. I also served on several corporate and nonprofit boards, including at PATH, then known as the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, a global nonprofit focused on innovations to advance human well‐being. I fell in love with PATH's mission, later serving as interim director of its India program, and then its CEO for almost eight years. That fourth undercurrent and my experiences working within it are the primary basis for the ideas in this book.

Leading PATH provided me with a master class in practical activism. I learned a great deal about when to push, where to pull back, and how to get stuff done—a lot of stuff. During my tenure, we raised more than US$2.5 billion for global health innovations and helped to develop hundreds of vaccines, drugs, diagnostics, tools, and digital systems that are reaching hundreds of millions of people and changing human health. In fact, riding this current in global development has deepened my belief in the power of practical activism. Because, frankly, the progress I've seen is astounding. Dare I say, it makes me even more optimistic—even in the wake of crises like COVID‐19. Consider:

 In 1979, one child out of eight died before turning five. Today, it's less than one in 20.

 Forty years ago, 30 percent of people on this planet subsisted on less than $2 a day. Today, extreme poverty affects fewer than 10 percent.

 Innovations in treatment for tuberculosis and malaria have saved more than 20 million lives since the start of this century.

 And in most places, HIV infection rates are declining, with a dramatic drop in deaths due to AIDS.

None of these milestones was inevitable. Each resulted from the hard work of people around the globe—research scientists, community health workers, activists, and legislators. Still, the question I am asked more often than any other is how I remain optimistic in the face of so much suffering. The work itself provides my answer. In fact, despite some terrifying headlines, there has never been a time of greater health and prosperity in human history. The past four decades have proven that cooperation between government, business, and the social sector can shrink poverty rates that once looked intractable and eliminate diseases that seemed undefeatable. There is no reason we can't do the same with present‐day ills, including climate change, biosecurity threats, and widening economic inequality.

As you will see in the coming pages, most of my time at PATH was spent figuring out better ways to meet the needs of the developing world. But the reasons I've found for optimism abroad exist at home too. For instance, consider the devastating crisis of opioid addiction. This remains a full‐scale disaster in the United States, estimated to cost our economy some $400 billion in medical interventions, foster care, and special education over the next 20 years. But slowly, we are beginning to develop procedures for stemming that tide, primarily by treating addiction as a public health problem rather than a moral failing, and getting anti‐addiction medication to more people. Still, in Seattle, a city shaped by the likes of Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon, the clash of extreme affluence and dire need is evident on our streets every single day. At home as abroad, the key to progress is acknowledging a dire reality while remembering that it is fully within our capability to bend the arc of the future toward better ends.

My colleagues and partners at PATH taught me much about channeling outrage into optimism. Every day, they demonstrated the heavy lifting of practical activism, what it takes to jump in, work behind the scenes on complicated issues, and commit to life‐changing impact over decades of relentless effort. They also helped me to shape my energy more productively, helping me understand the critical role of compromise in getting stuff done.

Compromise does not mean weakness; if used well, it is almost always a sign of strength. But it's not an easy balance, and often means working with influencers in business or philanthropy whose politics do not align with mine. It has landed me in front of world leaders whose record on human rights is abysmal. It has found me advocating for issues that some would consider counter to my own interests—campaigning for an income tax in my home state of Washington, for instance. Compromise has pushed me toward doing things that were awkward but important, like getting married at a walk‐in chapel in a San Jose strip mall so that Bob and I could be part of the early same‐sex marriage movement ahead of California's controversial Proposition 8 vote—though a marriage certificate was not important to us personally. Compromise has often forced me to weigh ends against the means of reaching them. In New York City, though Bob and I never got to live in married‐student housing, we did influence the university's policies around housing for students to come.

More recently at PATH, we worked with parliamentarians in Uganda who were contemplating laws that could sentence gay people to death. Should their attitudes preclude our engagement with that country around public health? Not if the goal is improving equity and safeguarding human rights. And while PATH endorsed imperatives on inclusivity, we regularly sought common ground with conservative policymakers to push progress on other issues. I am adamant, for example, about women having access to family planning choices, but I am also always willing to sit down with anti–family planning policymakers to see if we can come together on maternal and child‐health programs. Similarly, we worked with partners from Uganda, to Myanmar, to Ukraine and other countries where there are clear problems regarding human rights, authoritarianism, or corruption. Because the children who live in those places have as much right to better health as children everywhere.

These kinds of tensions in practical activism have been most pronounced through my lifelong work with China. Following a short talk I gave at the 2011 TED Conference in Long Beach, California—intended to do some myth‐busting about China's work in Africa—I was immediately pilloried by both sides: those who felt I was an apologist for China's aggressive engagements across Africa, and those who were angry that I'd criticized China's human rights and environmental record from a TED stage. This moment captured the essence of the challenges around engaging with China as it has become a global superpower. Yes, there is much to condemn and many policies about which to be wary. But there is also so much to gain. China is within reach of eliminating chronic poverty from its population of 1.5 billion people. After fighting some 30 million cases of malaria and facing down more than 30,000 deaths each year through the mid‐twentieth century, China is now on the verge of being declared malaria‐free by the World Health Organization (WHO). How can we ignore progress like that? What can we learn from a country that has brought more people into the middle class faster than any other in human history? China also has extraordinary assets in science and technology that could advance progress in fighting hunger and disease worldwide. Over the years PATH and its partners have chosen to focus on these opportunities, collaborating with China to access new vaccines and drugs for the developing world; help forge better policies related to digital health systems; and simultaneously navigate the ever‐changing political waters that engagement with China inevitably demands.

This practical approach to activism has enabled me to bridge divides that seem insurmountable, or at least logistically improbable. It's sometimes a confusing balancing act, visiting villages in western Myanmar where people barely subsist on daily rations of rice, then jetting off to speak to the .001 percent at Davos. Or talking with sex workers in roadside brothels in Zambia one week, and the next visiting the White House to discuss global development policies; learning about disruptive technologies at a Silicon Valley innovation conference, then sharing basic tips for nutrition with migrants in the urban slums of Dar es Salaam. Practical activism requires this kind of agility. It means building unlikely relationships with unexpected partners and playing different roles, all within the same 24 hours.

Not long ago, I attended a dinner in Kinshasa, capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Decimated by 20 years of war and internal conflict, the DRC is one of the poorest nations on the planet and rife with corruption. Of the 186 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index, the DRC ranks nearly last. Three out of four people there live on less than $2 a day. Yet my dinner companions—young doctors and medical researchers—were hopeful, even joyful, about new immunization programs, HIV‐prevention tools, and family planning methods that PATH and its partners had helped bring to the country. They were trying to deliver healthcare to 80 million people in a country the size of Western Europe, where roads, electricity, clinics, medicine, and doctors were all in short supply. My tablemates were buzzing about the positive differences they'd already seen in Congo's rural villages and city slums: the improvements coming through innovative health tools and a slowly improving public health system; the way capabilities are expanding with a new generation of well‐educated Congolese around the world who have returned to help rebuild their country; and the new opportunities for eliminating old diseases like polio and sleeping sickness. With their nation finally moving toward peace and stability, these health leaders saw themselves at a turning point, and their optimism was contagious.

None of the undercurrents in my life—gay rights, China's ascendance, evolving technology, or the revolution in global development—were things I had forecast; rather, it was more a matter of recognizing what was happening around me and embracing it. My ability to do so was a scaled‐up version of my old childhood talent for reading the waters. As an activist, this work needs to happen at two levels, simultaneously.

Many social currents are clearly visible at the surface—for instance, climate change. Preventing and mitigating the impacts of a warmer climate will dictate aspects of health funding and agricultural innovation for decades to come. The need to address climate change is obvious, critical, and—as enshrined in the 17 United Nations' SDGs for 2015 to 2030—already shaping the direction of global development.

Many other acute challenges facing society are also visible on the surface: growing inequality, homelessness, mass incarceration and its devastating effect on communities, pandemics emerging in countries without universal health coverage. The list goes on. Each of these is vital to address, and they appear throughout this book to illustrate its overall thesis.

But our primary focus is undercurrents, the powerful macrotrends that exist beneath the surface. Often, it is the immense size of these undercurrents that blinds us. These forces are so all‐encompassing that they form a backdrop to the everyday, such that we may overlook them as individual forces to be harnessed for good. Exactly how does one learn to identify which trends are broad and deep enough to shape the future, then marshal their strength for positive change? We'll discuss that in the coming pages. If my life is any example, you must be curious, able to tolerate risk, willing to trust your gut, and, perhaps most fundamentally, remain optimistic.

Reading the waters in front of us, and focusing on the major forces that will shape the next decades in human development, I believe the following five powerful undercurrents will be pivotal. My hope is that activists reading this book will use them to make a difference:

1 Pyramid to diamond. Our global economy is changing dramatically. Throughout the twentieth century, the world's economy was depicted as a pyramid, with wealthy countries at the apex and a vast base of the desperately poor. Now, as hundreds of thousands of people move into the middle class every day, that pyramid is morphing into a squat diamond. This means greater capacities for change across much of the developing world, and it will fundamentally alter the premise, approach, and tools we use as changemakers.

2 Communities are the customers. A shifting pyramid means we need to stop viewing developing countries as passive beneficiaries of aid. Instead, we must listen to, assist, and elevate struggling communities within each country—even those in middle‐ and high‐income countries. This change in focus means activists will work much more closely with local groups, responding to their demands for agency and self‐determination. It means thinking about our “customers” very differently.

3 Equity. Leveling the field for people of all genders, races and ethnicities, sexual orientations, and disabilities has been reignited as a promising frontier in development. How activists engage with different communities to ensure inclusion, diversity, and full participation will shape the agenda.

4 Digital disruption. New data tools and the digital revolution will accelerate social development across every sector, from health to agriculture, financial services, and education. These powerful new capabilities, properly harnessed, have the potential to supercharge well‐being for many more people. But they bring challenging questions around privacy, ethics, bias, and misinformation.

5 The surprisingly sexy middle. The key to improving millions of lives long‐term lies less in invention than scaling and adapting proven innovations—in other words, the all‐important journey between an inspired concept and its on‐the‐ground implementation. In many cases we have the tools and technology to make a difference, but they sit on laboratory shelves. What we need are more social activists focused on building out those ideas to connect with the daily lives of real communities.

We will explore these five concepts in detail, offering examples and suggesting how they might further the work of practical activists everywhere. My hope is that they also stimulate the vision of a new generation.