Reviving Public Culture

An Interview with Dr. Ian Marcus Corbin

The School of Aristotle by Gustav Adolph Spangenberg, ca 1883-1888

This is a transcript from an episode of The Harvard Salient Podcast, which can be listened to here or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

Sarah Steele: Hello everyone and welcome back to The Harvard Salient Podcast. I’m Sarah Steele, a senior at the College now and President Emerita of The Harvard Salient. It’s my pleasure to introduce you all to Dr. Ian Marcus Corbin. A little bit about Ian before we get started. Ian is a philosopher on the faculty in Neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School, where he co-directs the Human Network Initiative and is a Faculty Member at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. He serves as a Senior Fellow at the think tank Capita, co-directs the Trust and Belonging Initiative at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, and serves on the Ethics Committee at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Ian is joining us today because he is spearheading a new initiative here at Harvard called the Public Culture Project, which is aimed specifically at the revivification or reinvigoration of public life. Welcome, Ian. Thank you for being here.

Ian Marcus Corbin: Thank you, Sarah.

SS: I want to start with the Public Culture Project, which I think is an excellent idea. And I’m very excited to see what it will bring to campus. But I think it’s worthwhile to kind of couch the conversation in the political moment we’re in, both at Harvard and I think nationally.

Broadly speaking, we’re in a moment of tremendous concern for our young people. When I think of ‘the young people are not okay’, I think of Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy, where she describes the over-medicalizing of young people and their anxieties and depression. I think about general loneliness; the ‘loneliness epidemic’ is kind of like a buzzword, I would say nowadays, unfortunately. I think about family structures and broken family structures. I think about the opioid crisis, which is much more than just the current moment, but going back for many years. And I think about the isolation effect of the pandemic, specifically on the young people that are here at Harvard now.

We’re also, you know, before we started the podcast, we spoke a little bit about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. We’re on the other side of his murder and sort of the fallout effects from that politically. And the reality is Kirk was murdered by a young 22 year old man who was clearly chronically online, nihilistic, steeped in some dark activist corner of the internet that viewed discourse as violence. I think the concern about young people’s mental health has jumped in just the past couple weeks because of Kirk’s assassination from this kind of like simmering background issue, everyone knows the ‘kids are not okay’, to a headline national issue about why are young people so alienated from the public sphere, from their own families, and why are they retreating into these like digital arenas online where they’re dangerously radicalized sometimes? Also related to Kirk’s murder, Governor Spencer Cox is advising the Public Culture Project.

So given all of that, now that we’re kind of situated, tell me about the project and how it came to be and how you came to direct it.

IMC: Great, thank you. And I love all the things you were talking about; they are very important and dear to my heart as problems we need to work on together. So I hope we’ll get back around to them as we go.

So the Public Culture Project is something I’m standing up with my dear friend, Sean Kelly, who’s the Dean of Arts and Humanities for Harvard. I think it comes out of ⁓ years of conversation and friendship on our part. I think for both of us, we’re both philosophers by training and by general inclination. I think for us, existential, moral, even kind of spiritual questioning has been a really important way that we make our way in the world and understand ourselves and try to feel at home in our world. And in our classroom teaching, I think we’re both very sort of bold in saying like, this is important for you, right?

And I’ve taught thousands of students over the past 15 years. And most of them were forced to take my class. There are various sorts of required introductory classes. Now I’ve always had this sort of sales pitch to make: You should actually care about this. I know you don’t want to take it, but actually, your life, you’re going to need to have reflected on some of these things. You’re going to need to have a sense of who you are, how you fit into the larger cosmic picture, how you fit into society, what kind of life you should try to live. So that’s on the academic classroom level.

I think both Sean and I also have a long history of trying to do philosophy, deep humanistic thinking in public. We both have written for lots of popular outlets. I have a sort of a sideline where I work with politicians at a state and national level around issues of meaning, belonging, spirituality. I think it’s been a pleasant surprise to me that these serious people are interested in sitting down around a table and trying to understand why do young Americans feel so bereft of meaning and purpose in their lives?

I think this stuff can sound fuzzy at first and something that is just not the job of serious, practical people to address. I think that is an illusion and I think that’s gonna become more and more obvious as the years go by, these next several years. So I have this practice of really trying to facilitate this deep philosophical, existential, humanistic questioning outside of the academy.

I think I can speak for Sean and myself in saying that we both feel like there is too little of that sort of questioning going on both in academia and outside. I mean, one way you see it in academia, to take Harvard as an example, is last I heard, all of the Arts and Humanities put together have a total of 7% of Harvard undergrads concentrating in them. There are more people concentrating in Economics than there are in all the Arts and Humanities combined.

And at the same time, I would argue that our public life, our lives at work, our lives in politics, have been drained of a lot of that kind of deep, kind of moral, spiritual sap. And in various ways, we’ve been told and we believed that these sorts of things are sort of private matters. They need to be left at home. They need to be kept in the closet. I think that tends to lead to a kind of desiccated public sphere that can be really alienating for people, right?

We have decades and decades of people talking about soulless corporations, right? Like living in a kind of society that feels soulless. So I think these are, at first glance, maybe separate issues, but I think I have come to the conviction over time that they are not actually separate issues, that if you have a broader society that says that sort of thinking, questioning is a nice luxury, it’s unserious, frou-frou stuff that you might do with your free time, but it has nothing to say about technology and politics and business and all this, that of course you’re going to see a collapse of people in colleges wanting to study that stuff, right? Because people in college want to do serious stuff, they want to do stuff that matters. And if they’re told that the only thing that matters is how to crunch numbers on a spreadsheet, and that’s the consistent, thoroughgoing message that they get from the serious sectors of our public life… they’re likely to believe it. And they’re likely to think, well, “I need a job.”

Our society is one that on a historical scale is pretty dog-eat-dog-eat-dog. If you don’t have some money saved up for yourself, you could really fall on your face and be in big trouble. Which I have to say, again on a historical scale, is a pretty weird way for humans to live together. It’s pretty weird to live amongst people who would let you fall flat on your face and not really care.

And so it makes sense that people are flooding into Econ. It made sense for a while that they’re flooding into Computer Science. Apparently the kind of floor is falling out from under that a little bit as AI is threatening to take over a lot of those coding jobs. But anyway, I think that these two problems are deeply interlocked. And I think a university campus is a great place to start trying to deal with them together. So we’re hoping to have prominent leaders come to campus and to invite them into deep conversations about who they are, what they value, what do they want for America, what would be a good life for us, what is the point of an education, what does good work look like, what I think of as pretty philosophical questions.

So with that one move, we’re hoping that we can kind of seed into public life more permission to think in that more substantial deep way. And then also by example show that to the students that these very serious people seem to recognize that these are serious questions; that there’s serious work to be done by asking them. In a nutshell, that’s where the project came from.

SS: So two parts to that—one is the more kind of historical telling of how it came to be that people were dismissed…maybe could I sum it up as like a crisis of meaning or a crisis of soul, spirit, something like that. And then there’s the effect of that on the academy, Ivy League, and Harvard.

So first on the kind of big picture scale, I personally, see the crisis of meaning that we have right now as a new wave of disillusionment, which you can contest me on any of this, but hot take, we’re on wave four of disillusionment, perhaps, the first being post-WWI. The War to End All Wars, the sense that this can’t happen again. The second being the A-bomb and post-WWII, where that sense of helplessness, I think, got kicked into an overdrive. We have three, Vietnam, for at least Americans, that sense of, the government was supposed to not do this to us again, and now we’re in another crazy war and we’re protesting against it and they’re not listening. And I think that’s the start of the university’s disenchantment. Then wave four, which I think we’re finally experiencing is the Internet Age broadly and the effects of what that’s done to the prospects of people seeking a liberal arts education, just on a pure incentives level, but also in the sense of the internet as a distraction from real life. Would you disagree with any of that or would you say that just before we even get to the university’s kind of disenchantment that that rings true?

IMC: Yeah, I mean we might debate the kind of precise locations of the different points, but in particular I love that you talk about World War I. I just finished a draft of an essay about the run up to World War I. There’s this German Jewish or Austrian Jewish writer named Stefan Zweig who wrote this beautiful memoir called The World of Yesterday. He writes it from exile in Brazil in I believe 1942. So World War II is raging in his kind of homeland. And he and his wife finished the memoir, they mailed it off, and they killed themselves. Because the world that they had inhabited was, he thought, just dead forever, gone forever. Hitler had ruined it. So, the first two chapters of that book, one is called “The World of Security,” and the second one is called “At School in the Last Century.” So he describes fin de siècle Vienna among the upper middle class, bourgeois Viennese.

In some ways it’s just gorgeous. There’s all this vitality, there’s been a level of material progress that we could not imagine over the course of the 19th century. Suddenly there’s running water, there’s way more access to medication, there’s just all sorts of stuff that has drastically changed life. And there was this real sense of inevitable progress that especially the generation that was educating Zweig really held dear. They thought that the world is just getting better, science and reason and technology are going to save us, we just have to be tolerant of difference and eventually all these differences are going to melt away. We’ll just be one happy human race. We’re going to have unbelievable comforts and pleasures. There’s going to be room for all this cultural sophistication, these great works of art.

So, I think there are aspects of that that rhyme closely with a decent portion of my lifetime in America where there has been this deep optimism about progress and technology. And there are absolutely people right now who still really feel that way. We’ll hit little bumps and hiccups, but overall, we’re progressing towards a greater and more beautiful future characterized by tolerance and enlightenment and technology. I heard Ezra Klein of the New York Times make essentially that argument on a podcast earlier this week—that technology is really going to be able to save us.

So the fascinating thing is that the Zweig’s generation of students did not buy it. And they rejected the world of their fathers. And there was this really sharp generational breakdown between the professors and teachers and the students, where the professors were kind of standing on high and just sort of handing down the dogma of their generation. And Zweig says that it just didn’t speak to where the students were. They found it dead and stultifying. They rebelled. They would take their notes in class and study as they were supposed to because he said they didn’t want to be working class. They didn’t want to be kind of kicked out of the bourgeois and have to go into the trades or something.

But they were seeking their actual intellectual sustenance elsewhere. They’re going to the Viennese coffee shops and reading these kind of rebellious new thinkers and poets and writers from around the world. And they’re having this kind of thrilling exploration off campus. Right?

SS: Sounds familiar.

IMC: No, I see something very similar happening right now where there is, I think, a lot of disillusionment. And this is not just, I know I’m speaking to the Salient, this is not just conservative students. I think there’s deep disillusionment not entirely across the board, it’s pretty widespread.

SS: I agree.

IMC: I think we’re in a very philosophical moment. I think people are asking big questions, but they’re not doing it typically, you know, in the mainstream institutions, which is something we really want to change. We want to grab that energy and participate in it and pull it in. In the case of Zweig’s generation, they never did that, right? The professors couldn’t pull it in—they didn’t even know what was going on. But there was this sort of subterranean, shifting of plates happening that the students could feel. And in Zweig’s telling, this sort of ended up being a big part of the energy that led to the First World War, with this sense that something has to change, right? Something’s not right here, something’s not enough about our way of life.

Even though he’s like a pacifist—he’s like a writer, literary guy, he’s not warlike—he talks about how thrilling it was when the war broke out. The divisions that existed between his countrymen suddenly melted and everyone was part of something bigger than themselves and they felt like they belonged, and they were part of a brotherhood, and it was incredibly beautiful and moving.

And what I see there is that prosperous, tolerant, progressive modernity has a lot of things it’s great at and it has some things that it’s not great at. And I think repeatedly in modern history, you see these upsurges of a demand for something thicker, a different kind of belonging, a deeper kind of belonging, a sense of having a mission in life that is more than just getting rich and being nice to people.

It’s our heroism, and holiness, and this sort of deep human stuff. I think again and again, you see kind of a swing between settlements that make modernity bearable or even good and make it work. And then, you know, times where people say this just isn’t working. I don’t feel any meaning here. This doesn’t seem real to me. I think you see something like that happen, you know, in the 1960s where students just absolutely were disillusioned, burned out with what they were getting from their professors and they rebelled. And I think you’re sort of quietly seeing that now.

And so I really like that you didn’t just say, okay, look, the internet is radicalizing people. These crazy message boards are making people believe terrible stuff and derealizing their world to the point where it kind of seems like shooting a political opponent might be a cool video game experience. But there are also push factors. If you’re embedded in a community that is shot through with meaning, and you feel a deep sense of connection there, and you feel a deep sense of who you are and what you want to become, you’re just not that likely to fall down the 4chan rabbit hole. There are just times where a given societal settlement….it gets old, gets creaky, I don’t know, but it stops meeting the needs, it stops answering to the kind of deep desires, especially of young people. They’re the ones who tend to notice it. And to a degree that people of my generation and older generations have a hard time seeing fully…I do feel like we’re at an inflection point like that. And it’s really imperative, I think, for us to find ways to not that, let that just go on out of sight, but to pull these young people who have legitimate worries and fears, legitimate reasons to be discontent, and pull them into conversation so that we can talk together like people.

I may be eventually proved naive about this, but I have a lifelong kind of bone deep sense that people can talk to each other and that I strongly disagree with stuff people do and ways that people respond to these longings and these discontentments, but I think we can absolutely connect over, you know, what it is that you are afraid of, what it is you love and you long for. And so that’s definitely an aspect of what we’re going to try to do with the Public Culture Project.

SS: So that’s kind of the long view. Shorter term, particularly when you talk about ‘belonging’ and ‘community’, these have been bounced around as futile terms. In 2020, the year leading up to 2020, perhaps the past decade or so at Harvard, there was a DEI office. But Harvard didn’t call it that. They called it the Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. It’s since been renamed, over the summer, to the Office for Community and Campus Life, because DEI is basically a violation of the Civil Rights Act, according to the Trump administration.

But certainly if you’re going to steelman, DEI, and you just look at its component parts…if you leave off the “Diversity” and “Equity” as kind of more political and racial constructs, but “Inclusion” and “Belonging”....it’s harder to disagree with that. Of course you want people to be included, and of course you want them to belong [on a college campus].

Given that, Harvard’s OEDIB office had basically failed to create a sense of inclusion and belonging, even though it was created under that title, and it’s since been transformed into something that’s been rid of its politically charged aspects…I would argue that DEI in universities that made students more anxious about being with each other at the fear of offending their fellow students in 20 different ways before you even meet them, just on identity markers alone and pronouns alone.

[Is] Harvard is at this point potentially looking for something that is genuinely uniting under the banner of inclusivity and belonging, but no longer on an identitarian basis?

IMC: I will have to profess almost total ignorance of the campus politics around that, and what offices are named, what exactly they’ve done. I will say that I see movements, and I’m going to be fair about this, but I see movements among young people, largely young men on the right right now, that want to sort of have a frankly chauvinistic sense of ‘The West’, right? And we’re standing for Western civilization. We’re against barbarism. And we want to defend Heritage Americans, right?

SS: What’s a Heritage American?

IMC: Oh, really? I mean, you’ve heard the term, have you?

SS: Yeah, but what is it?

IMC: I think it’s people who come from a kind of older ethnic stock that arrived early.

SS: So it’s an identity argument?

IMC: Yeah, I think it’s not Ellis Island immigration. I think it’s in earlier stages of English and German immigration. And I think this is a larger stream on the young right than I would have expected. And I have to look at these young men with some sympathy, right? You want some sense of who we are. There’s nothing there’s nothing inhumane about wanting a sense of who we are, right? There’s nothing inhumane about wanting to have a sense of where we come from and where our home is.

I spent some time in the past couple years in Uganda. They have a word for white people—mzungu—which means wanderer. And they contrast that with a mutaka, who’s someone who lives close to their soil, and who lives near the soil where their ancestors are buried, and the soil that gave rise to them gives rise to new life. And they think this is a matter of deep importance, to stay connected to your land, right, to be where your people have been.

And I think there’s just something human about that sort of desire. It’s not always a desire that can be met, right? People move for various reasons. There’s lots of different ways to live a life. But I do think it’s relatively kind of a natural human thing to want that sense of place and connection. I think to do it in a kind of ethno-chauvinist way, the way I see it happening, at least online, among the young right, I think is not the right way. And I’m sad for them, and I worry a little bit about where it could go. So that’s the Right.

I would say something similar about some of the more convulsive, exclusive forms of leftism that we saw in 2019 and 2020. And I should say that I’m not here speaking for the Public Culture Project, I’m here just speaking for myself. I think a lot of my students over the years have looked forward in their lives and they expect to go to Goldman Sachs or McKinsey and grind away for decades to slightly goose the quarterly earnings of these massive behemoths, right? That’s not a super meaningful way to expand your productive years and your productive energy as a person. That is a pretty hollow thing, I think, to imagine for your life.

A lot of the politics of purity and frankly just tribalism that you’re objecting to from that particular window in American life was again a response to that feeling of hollowness, and wanting to feel like you have a tribe and who are we? And very often, I don’t know that it always needs to be this way, but quite often if we’re gonna nail down a substantial compelling story of ‘us’, we need a ‘them.’

Again, I don’t think this always has to be the case, but it often is. And so, I try to deal with that in a kind of similar spirit of charity that is like, “Yeah, I get it. You don’t want to just be a kind of meaningless cog.” Maybe you can work at Goldman at the same time, like advocate for, you know, greater inclusivity and ethnic justice and justice around things like gender…and certainly in certain cases that is warranted, that’s called for, right? But I think some of the ferocity and this kind of exclusiveness that we saw was just another version of this desire to feel like we have—-who are we? We are someone, we have some values, we’re gonna order our life and our collective action in accordance with those values. We’re not just gonna be kind of, you know, meaningless company men and women who are gonna live out our you know, work 30, 40 years and then retire.

SS: I think people generally kind of agree with the notion that the germ of each idea is not totally incomprehensible—it’s that it’s taken too far because of some deeper crisis of meaning, [or] a God-shaped hole. You’re ultimately putting the burden on yourself to figure it out, whereas I think a religious conservative would say that the only real remedy to that is to unburden yourself from having to figure out, “What am I doing? Why am I doing it? What’s the meaning of my life?” And you instead look to God. The structure of religion does a lot of that for you, and you can subscribe to it. And the effect is you now have meaning, and you can work at Goldman. But being at Goldman Sachs isn’t the primary source of your meaning. It’s like a secondary purpose that you serve because you also have this larger religiosity happening in your life.

I think there’s an argument in the academy that something similar has happened, reflecting kind of a larger trend, which is that students are more secular than they were. I was looking at Crimson polling going back to 2000. So the past 20ish years or so.

In 2000, 52% of students described themselves as religious at Harvard. In 2017, jumping ahead a ton, you have 24%. So that gets cut in half. And then in 2027, so the students who are currently Juniors now and, you know, feasibly are getting internships at Goldman and McKinsey and that type of thing, two thirds describe themselves as “not at all religious” or “not very religious.” 15% of the class of 2027 describes themselves as “very” or “extremely” religious. So I just wonder, from a conservative religious perspective, can a Public Culture Project look at religiosity in a way that isn’t calling for a public religion? Just by maybe a call to action to students to consider that as a source of meaning?

Or, can it only happen in the academic setting, at least for now, as an exploration of other sources of meaning that don’t have to do with church or synagogue?

IMC: Yeah, so in the particular case of the Public Culture Project, our first event is “How is digital technology shaping the human soul?” And we mean that very broadly. Maybe mostly, from my perspective, in a kind of Aristotle sense of the soul, an animating force or whatever [it is] that holds you together and constitutes yourself. But we want to include in that how it is shaping how we think, how we feel, how we relate to one another, how we contemplate the deepest realities, and also how we worship.

I personally feel like it’s good and fine to open those questions up in public. I think that this sort of privatization of deep philosophical, spiritual, religious thinking is something that happened especially in the second half of the 20th century. And there are some very influential philosophers, some of whom taught here at Harvard, who were sort of explicitly advocating that you have to put that in private, right? We’re going to end up in all these horrible brawls. We’re going to end up in terrible wars if we’re trying to argue around what is the nature and destiny of the human person? Right? And so let’s keep that in private.

In public, we’ll make sure that the resources are spread relatively equitably, and then you do with that what you will. Right? Each individual person will decide for him or herself what they want to do with those resources that we’ve given them. And, you know, they can be educated by their priest or their imam or their mom and dad or whatever. So I mean, that’s a relatively recent historical, historically recent move.

And I’m not so convinced by it. I think that we are not so easily compartmentalized. And I’m not in favor of a kind of national church or something in America, but I think we should be exploring together, arguing together, sharing what actually we think is truest. So I don’t see any reason why that can’t be part of the conversation at an academic institution.

I should say our second event that we’re still nailing down the particularities of is, “God in the American Story: The Past and Future of a Presence”---that’s the title of it. I think, undoubtedly, the idea of God and God’s views about America and God’s wishes for America have been massively, deeply formative for us in our history. And I think in various ways they continue to be and in various ways they’re going to continue to be.

So I think you just come at it head on. It doesn’t even seem that complicated to me. You work in a spirit of generosity, right? And you let people say what they think. And then maybe you say you don’t agree. And you push back and forth. And you talk, right? I feel no compunction at all about hosting that as an academic.

But I wasn’t sure whether there was a kind of deeper question that you wanted to ask about, like, is there a God-shaped hole? is that an accurate reading? I’m happy to talk about that if you want. I would probably quibble a little. You said religious conservatives think that, you know, religion, spiritual practice, a relationship with the deity can give shape to a life, which they certainly do. But I think that’s not just conservatives. That’s the people who have a religious or spiritual orientation.

SS: Sure. I think I’m grafting the national political divides into the academic context maybe a little bit too much there. But in terms of the question, “Where do you derive your meaning?” We’ve been talking about kind of like the whiplash of identity politics from the left to maybe some of it coming up on the right now, perhaps in response to one another, or it’s just a kind of natural political boomerang that’s bound to happen…that, in the academic setting at least, is toxic.

From the conservative’s perspective in viewing Harvard at this point, they would view the liberal arts education at Harvard, the Humanities Department even specifically, as particularly activist-laden, filled with leftists, progressives who are not offering this charitable view of the world but instead they’re using their professorial position to encourage what is not intellectual exploration or discussion, but an activist’s worldview.

And I think that lends itself to now another moment coming from conservatives of saying, okay, that has to be totally removed and excised from the university in order for us to continue in any productive way.

IMC: So are you saying like you know conservatives are thinking we just have to root out this poison out or something?

SS: Right, and also at this moment in time, I think there are a lot of conservatives who unfortunately have discarded Harvard in their minds to the point where there’s plenty of folks who have talked about not even hiring Harvard graduates because they’re bound to be activist, pains-in-the-butt the second they enter their company…and I think that’s a pretty strong sign of what they think about the average Harvard grad and what they’re digesting when they’re here.

IMC: Yeah. I don’t know all the professors in the Arts and Humanities, so I can’t really speak for what their classroom environment is like or how ideological they are. But I know [Dean] Sean [Kelly], since taking up the job, has spoken to hundreds of faculty members. What he tells me is that he doesn’t think that caricature is fair at all. He thinks that you have a lot of people who just deeply love, like, or Victorian literature or, you know, Latin American history, and just really care about it and think it’s really good and like to do it.

I do think, and again I’m speaking second or third hand here, I think there’s been a reticence on the part of a lot of professors to be as bold as they ought to be about saying why this matters to them, and why this is good and how this could help you live better. If you could understand this stuff, here’s how this could conduce to a happy, flourishing life.

I think most people don’t go into the extremely long, difficult, grueling, professionally uncertain path of getting a PhD in Art or Humanities if they don’t find it personally nourishing in some way. I think they care about it and it’s important to them.

I’ve sat in on some of Sean’s classes and I’ve seen him teaching a particular text and, you know, there’d be a kind of hush in the room and he sort of, he has this very gentle presence and he’ll say, look, “If you read this text the way it should be read, this could change your life forever.” Which to me, like, that is the stakes.

And I’m not sure I have encountered a lot of professors in our time and place that will just be that open about that and will be that brave about that and that inspired and inspiring.

So I don’t see quite the radicalism that people seem to see from outside. Often, if I hear something about Harvard, I think like, they must mean something else, some other place. I don’t see it. I think, if anything, there’s a sort of cautiousness among the students, for the most part. I don’t see them as kind of ravening lunatics on any side. I see them as kind of anxious, earnest, people who just want to make their way in the world. If anything, I think they’re a little too compliant and they want to know what to do to get a good grade so that they can get a good internship, so they can get a good job. That’s been closer to my experience at least.


SS: I do think this project of yours is extremely well-timed, just in the sense that people need to be given the kind of roadmap out of all this mess being here on campus.

IMC: I really think we can.

SS: I’m very hopeful that people will grab onto it as a sort of guide.

IMC: Thank you. My email is on the Public Culture website, and we are just actively, you know, seeking out partners and people to build it really out from scratch. I mean, obviously in various ways right now Harvard’s resources are scarcer than they have been at most times in Harvard’s history, right? So we’re kind of trying to build from scratch here and we just want to work with people and we want to talk with people of goodwill and you know, we’d just be glad to to field you know, anyone who wants to reach out and get involved or talk, please please come find me.

SS: I think that’s a perfect note to end on. Will you just tell everyone where to find more information?

IMC: Everyone can come. We would be happy if you would register. That would maybe be helpful for us. Our first event is Wednesday, October 1st. This is sort of a soft launch. There’ll be more coming up .But we have a mailing list on the website—-please sign up and stay in touch with us! Thank you so much, Sarah. This has been a great conversation.

SS: Of course.

Register here for the Public Culture Project’s first event, “How is Digital Technology Shaping the Human Soul?” https://artsandhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/event/how-digital-technology-shaping-human-soul

Learn more about the Public Culture Project https://artsandhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/public-culture-project