Dinner with Chris Sacca

Last night was one of those surreal and amazing Oxford nights. I was invited to a dinner to welcome Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives at Google, as an Associate Fellow of the Said Business School. Chris has become very involved with SBS over the years, particularly in the annual Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford event. He's also an all around smart and genuine guy who always has something interesting to say, so I was really looking forward to the evening. There were thirteen guests in all, including Professor Colin Mayer, Dean of SBS, Professor Roger Cashmore, Principal of Brasennose College, and Dr Chris McKenna, Linda Scott, and Jonathan Black, lecturers at SBS.

The evening started out with some light drinks in the principals lodge. It was strange to be a student amongst a group of faculty and high level administrators, but the conversation flowed smoothly and I relaxed a bit. Chris McKenna, Linda Scott, and I talked a bit about the surveillance society and how many pragmatists (myself included) have traded a bit of privacy for the safety and convenience it brings. Though virtually every step one takes in the UK is recorded on video camera, this really does nothing but to generate countless hours of mundane tape of people going about their everyday lives. No big deal if you live your public life as if it was public, but maybe a bit more sensitive when it comes to public political actions like protests or sensitive personal events like family planning. Chris showed up along with Fiona Reid, Director of Entrepreneurship Said, and the conversation turned to Chris's blog (http://www.whatisleft.org/) and gun violence in America. However, we were soon directed to the Tower Bursury for dinner.

This is the room (just above the entrance hall in the picture above) where the college administrators used to count the money collected from students and farmers who rented college owned plots of land. The setting was amazingly ornate; wood paneled walls, ancient college crests, silver candelabras, and a long dining table decorated with 17th century silver pieces.

The food was great, but the conversation was really the highlight of the evening. Chris McKenna spoke of how every city has a question, such as How did you get here? (LA) What college did you go to? (Boston) How much is your rent? (NYC) Where do your children go to school? (London) and East or West? (St Louis and Jerusalem). The questions vary, but the underlying quest to develop a shorthand for classifying people remains the same.

The conversation then drifted to the neurological roots of racism and terrorism, specifically the role of mirror neurons in creating deeply embedding empathetic responses to images of suffering. Thus, highly educated, wealthy Arab men who have not directly experienced oppression can empathize so deeply with the perceived suffering of Palestinians that they feel justified in retaliatory acts of aggression. This is an interesting explanation of terrorism, but also raises questions as to the power of media to encourage or discourage these kinds of deep empathetic responses.

In the case of 9/11, each victim was brought to life in the media. We learned of their families, their hopes and dreams, and developed an understanding that the world was a lessor place due to their tragic loss. The American public has a deep empathy with the victims of 9/11, and when politicians invoke 9/11, the emotional response is so powerful as to override the intellectual response. However, what of the soldiers in Iraq? My opinion is that they've generally been abstracted to mere numbers. As Stalin said, one man's death is a tragedy, a million dead is a statistic. Does the lack of depth, of humanization of the suffering of soldiers and Iraqis, lead the American public to a certain callousness? Does 9/11 trump any debate on Iraq because of a lack of empathy? These are interesting questions.

Anyhoo, back to the dinner. I talked with Chris McKenna a bit about whether we lived in a time similar to just before the outbreak of World War I; a time of massive, yet fragile globalization and tectonic technological shifts in the way we organized our daily lives. Could globalization be halted or reversed? What of the falling dollar? Again, interesting questions and interesting conversations.

The evening wound down with desert and several rounds of wine and port from the Brasenose cellar. We bid farewell and I wandered out into a beautiful Oxford night, my mind swimming with ideas and a certain thrill of being here, now.