Transcriber: Amanda Chu Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Most TED Talks are short and simple.
I'm going to do something a little different.
Now, don't panic.
I'm not going to talk for an hour,
but I'm going to talk about something that´s not so simple:
complexity.
Because I think today,
complexity is at risk of becoming an endangered species.
Leonardo da Vinci,
a man close to the heart here in Tours and the Loire valley,
said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
I think our world now
is moving in the direction of simplifying without sophistication,
of simplifying in terms of binaries:
red or blue,
in or out,
with me or against me.
As a filmmaker working in documentaries,
I'm often faced with stories that are not simple,
that demand looking deeper to try to see a bigger picture,
even when that picture is very complicated.
Because each of us has a view on the world around us;
It's what I would call our personal sphere of perspective.
Imagine that it's kind of a bubble, or a half bubble,
the bubble in which we each live and from which we see things.
It's formed from our background,
our culture,
the time we live,
the news we get,
the thoughts we allow ourselves.
When the great Galileo
said that yes, indeed, the Earth does revolve around the Sun,
he thought that the complexity of science and his religion
could fit together in a wider vision of the universe.
And even after he was forced to deny his work
and was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life,
the story goes that he was kneeling as a sign of respect to the Church
in front of his inquisitors at the trial,
and as he got up,
he said, " Eppur si muove,"
"Et pourtant elle tourne" -
"and yet it moves."
In essence, he was saying even with the desire for simplification,
even if we say things are simple,
the truth is they are so much more complex.
So I want to tell a story
about my personal sphere of perspective
and how it's changed in the past few years
in regards to my life as a parent, as a filmmaker, and as a citizen.
I'm a filmmaker in a company that were four sisters when I started.
And our latest film is a documentary
on drag queens, drag kings, and transgender performers
in an unexpected location of midwest America -
Columbus, Ohio.
Using drag as a window,
we were able to look deeper, in the film, at the concept of gender itself
as something that is separate and distinct from our biologies and our sexualities,
and how complex we all are
in our identities regarding these three things.
One day I was doing an interview with two drag kings in the film,
Becky Harrison and Ethan Bulk,
aka the Reverend Roy Rodgers and Dr. Cool Ethan,
and I was asking them questions
about types of drag and the people who did it.
I was trying to drill down, to define the categories and dynamics
of the performers who pursue the art form.
What struck me was that Becky and Ethan,
even in the language they use, never defined other individuals -
either their identities, their reasons, or their art even.
It was like a light bulb suddenly switched on
because I could see they were using even some different language
than that which I was raised on.
My personal sphere of perspective expanded
in a suddenly imperceptible shift wider.
They were using language
that didn't define or divide or categorize us into groups
but rather, truly accepted us in the complexity that we all represent.
Now, the film has just screened here in Tours,
and it's been inspiring
to see how some forward- and imaginative-thinking people,
the educators here like Concetta Pennuto or Philippe van de Rix,
have been working with students
to understand how the university could examine its own traditions,
its sphere of perspective,
and try to widen, broaden,
and allow more complexity within that circumference.
While I'm a filmmaker, I'm also a parent.
I have a daughter and a son.
Anyone who raises or works with children knows it's an experience
that opens a whole new view on the world around you.
One way this happened with me was with my daughter in school.
My daughter started out first grade really strong,
but within two years,
I found out that she was just above needing remedial help in math.
I went to talk with the teachers.
They said that she was having trouble grasping some of the basic concepts.
A year later, my daughter was eight,
and she asked me for help on her math homework.
She said she didn't understand
the teachers asking why we don't look for highest common multiples
between two numbers
because, she said, it would be interesting to know
where pairs of numbers intersect on their different levels of infinity.
(Laughter)
Clearly, my daughter was thinking about things
just a little bit differently than I was.
So I went to talk to the principal about it,
and what she said surprised me in its positioning of perspective.
She said, "When I look at this child, her performance, and scores,
I wonder how we are not reaching her,
what she is seeing that we are not.
She proposed floating my daughter into an accelerated math class
the following year,
just as an experiment.
What happened was my daughter suddenly blossomed.
She went from doing poorly on tests to sometimes struggling,
but other times being the first to answer a question,
especially when it was math riddles the teacher would give the class.
What's the most interesting about what happened
is that not only did my daughter's perspective expand
on what was possible for herself,
but also her teachers' perspective
expanded on what was possible for other children as well.
Now, it's obvious - but it bears repeating -
all children are unique,
and yet often our gut instinct is to categorize them;
we know all boys are not the same, all girls are not the same,
and yet we put them under simplistic labels:
"You are gifted." "You are not" - sorry.
"You're troublemakers." "You're good kids."
"All-boy." "All-girl."
And where do we stand when we're making these judgments
but within our own sphere of perspective?
What happens if we were to step out into new ideas,
even when they could be challenging.
Which brings me to the third way that my perspective has widened
in the past few years as a citizen in the world.
I'll start where it all started:
my dad and my mom, and their parenting of me.
My parents came from humble and somewhat conservative backgrounds,
and they strongly believed in our responsibility
to engage in the world:
Do unto others as you would have done unto you.
It wasn't always easy or simple;
for instance, soon after I was born,
my mom decided to run as a delegate for Shirley Chisholm.
Shirley Chisholm was the first African-American woman
elected to the US Congress,
the first black candidate of a major party in America,
and the first black woman to run for president of the United States,
in 1972.
My mom was kind of a traditional housewife with five kids,
not the first person you would think would run out to do this.
But she heard Chisholm's powerful speeches,
and she saw the work she was doing,
and she saw how the world could be different
from the one that she had been raised and taught
was the way things were and would continue to be.
She didn't know all the answers on how to get there,
but she did acknowledge the complexity of the problems
and how opening up to the risk of new possibilities
would be the first step.
In contrast, today we're seeing an increasing funneling
of our thoughts, our politics, our social media posts
into a binary system:
zero or one, of oppositions,
all or nothing -
everything's great as it is or everything's hopeless.
There's a strong opinion
and then a strong reaction to that opinion,
with an increasing sense of otherization,
where the other side is foolish or ridiculous or evil.
What this does is demoralize us and separate us from one another
rather than open our minds to find solutions together.
I think about how my parents
joined the conversation even when it was hard,
so I know it's now up to me to not shy away from the hard issues,
to not withdraw even when I want to,
but to not simplify and to know that the process of history is long,
with hope being the most powerful and necessary tool
for us all to use in facing the future.
My mother had hope.
And she went out, and she walked from house to house,
talking with her neighbors,
and she went to that convention with Shirley Chisholm.
These are my mother's shoes.
I'm literally walking in my mother's shoes today.
Now, Shirley Chisholm didn't go on to win the presidency.
What she did was she opened horizons
for the future, for me, for my mom and dad, for all of us.
So, two years ago,
after a sudden discovery of advanced pancreatic cancer,
my mother died.
When we found out she had little time left,
I was actually on vacation in France for the first time in many years.
The next day I was on a flight to Los Angeles.
I was bumped off the flight because they'd overbooked,
so they put me on another plane and they gave me a seat in business class.
And when I finally got on that plane
and the flight attendant asked if I wanted a drink,
I said, "Oh, yes."
I suddenly was a little embarrassed because it was 10 a.m.,
and I felt I had to explain,
so I ran up to the flight attendant and told her why.
Instead of judging or dismissing me,
she turned toward me, and she opened her arms,
and she held me in a hug
that seemed constructed of pure kindness.
In that moment, I could tell that she was part of a group
who could see the world in a way I was about to see it.
Before then,
I couldn't imagine the world without my parents,
and now I can.
My personal sphere of perspective has expanded in a profound way.
I think about things differently.
I didn't know then what I know now.
And what we know about the universe around us -
today scientists are saying 95% of all matter,
we don't know what it is.
What this means is we only know actually 5% of what's around us.
Think about that for a second:
all we can see around us is only 5% of what is actually out there.
In the words of a wonderful American film actor, Dick Van Dyke,
"Just knowing you don't have all the answers
is a recipe for humility, openness, acceptance, forgiveness,
and an eagerness to learn - and those are all good things."
That's complexity.
It's hard.
Sometimes it's painful; sometimes, confusing.
After all, it requires humility
to admit that we may not know what we think we know,
that we don't even know what we don't know,
and that maybe this means
our gut opinion requires a follow-up question to ourselves
about whether or not we're thinking about things
from within our closed circle,
or whether we might imagine -
take a moment and imagine a circumference that could be even wider.
The world's not binary;
it's not girls versus boys,
win or lose,
black or white.
We need black and white together.
We need nuance.
We need the opportunities of a spectrum of the whole rainbow.
In the end, this is about acknowledging the intersectional structure
of our reality.
And for us to get there,
we need to imagine a world
that goes beyond the horizons that we think we know,
in fact, to look around us
and see there's so much more that we can't even see.
Okay, we may not each be Galileo,
but we could each be our own Galileos,
to try to open up our minds to the possibilities of what could be,
even when it's difficult and takes time.
So my question to you is this:
When you read that next headline,
when you see someone on the street who doesn't look or dress just like you,
when a loved one says something
that sounds challenging, strange, naïve,
or maybe even from another planet,
what is your reaction going to be?
Are you going to position yourself in a binary system
and react "with or against,"
or are you going to maybe take a moment
and try to imagine a new way of seeing,
to look into the deep dark spaces, the places we can't quite see yet,
and maybe push the edge of your sphere just a little bit wider?
What are you willing to open your mind to?
"Eppur si muove."
Thank you.
(Applause)