Illuminations Artists and UC Berkeley Professors Discuss Individual Liberties and Community Needs

How do we reckon with the tension between individual liberties and community needs?

Produced and directed by Mina Girgis, Cal Performances’ Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement; Directed and edited by Lindsay Gauthier. Full credits below.

In this video, Illuminations artists and distinguished UC Berkeley faculty explore the longstanding and complex tension between individual liberties and community needs. On one hand, individual liberties are important for protecting individual autonomy and ensuring that people have the freedom to pursue their own goals and values. On the other hand, community needs are also important for promoting the common good and ensuring that society as a whole functions smoothly and fairly.

In many cases, individual liberties and community needs can be balanced through thoughtful and careful decision-making. However, there are also situations where individual liberties and community needs may come into conflict, such as in cases of public health emergencies or national security concerns. In such cases, difficult choices may need to be made to balance competing interests and priorities. In this video, artists and UC Berkeley scholars discuss the key to creating policies and practices that promote the well-being of all members of society while also respecting individual rights and freedoms.

Topics include:

• 0:00 – Intro
• 0:14 – Individual Liberties & Community Needs
• 1:55 – Free Speech
• 6:36 – Tradition & Values
• 8:46 – Liberty & Equality
• 12:29 – Spirituality & the Science of Awe

This video features Dacher Keltner, PhD, Professor of Psychology and Faculty Director of the Greater Good Science Center; Charles Hirschkind, PhD, Professor of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies; Magdelys Savigne and Elizabeth Rodriguez of OKAN; Juana María Rodríguez, PhD, Professor of Ethnic Studies; Erwin Chemerinsky, JD, Distinguished Professor of Law and Dean of Berkeley Law; Taylor Mac, writer and co-director of Bark of Millions; and Mame Diarra Speis, Artistic Director of Urban Bush Women, and Courtney J. Cook, Associate Artistic Director of Urban Bush Women.

Learn more about  Illuminations: “Individual & Community.”

Additional Credits:

• Directors of Photography: Heath Orchard, Avery Hudson, Ethan Indorf
• 1st Assistant, Cameras: Jared Tabayoyon, Aja Pilapil
• Special thanks to the UC Berkeley Library for hosting faculty video interviews.

Transcript

Dacher Keltner:
One thing we do know is music has very clear effects on the body. It opens your body up, activates the vagus nerve. It makes you feel open to the world rather than closed. It synchronizes us. It turns us into a collective.

Charles Hirschkind:
Community is a term that makes anthropologists quite nervous, particularly for the way in which it occludes the kind of operations of power by which collectivities are created and formed.

Magdelys Savigne:
Women were hidden and it was dangerous for us. In Santiago, it was very dangerous to be called a lesbian.

Juana María Rodríguez:
People want to feel a part of something. The nuclear family is not enough. We need bigger, more expansive structures.

Erwin Chemerinsky:
The relationship between individual and community is always a very complex one. There’s often a tension between wanting to protect the freedom of the individual and what’s best for the community.

Taylor Mac:
It all comes from a concept that my drag mother gave me, which is like, if you’re not having fun at the party, go make another party.

Mame Diarra Speis:
So essentially what we were doing was breaking the fourth wall with the audience and saying, “Hey, you are a part of this as well. If I’m examining and if I’m unpacking, then let’s ask these questions of you.” Because at the end of the day, we’re trying to lift up everyone’s humanity.

Free Speech

Elizabeth Rodriguez:
People are just literally taking to the streets. They are tired of 62 years of a dictatorship that has lasted way too long. People are hungry. People are dying. People got tired, finally, and woke up. We are supporting them from all over the world. Cubans in New York, Cubans in Miami, Cubans all over the world are supporting them because the government actually cut off internet for a few hours. So we didn’t know what was happening.

So we had to let the world know that Cuba was on the streets. And that’s what we’re doing here. We cannot go to Cuba right now, but we’re here supporting our people, and supporting them and saying that this is enough and the time has come.

We are very open in our career about what the real situation in Cuba is. My name is Elizabeth Rodriguez and I am a violinist and a singer.

Magdelys Savigne:
I’m Magdelys Savigne, percussionist and composer. We have a band called OKAN. It means “heart” in our Afro-Cuban dialect.

Elizabeth Rodriguez:
It has always been a mission of mine to tell people around me that don’t know much about Cuba, about my country, what really goes on there. It’s not always been well received, but at least in my band, I finally was able to have my own voice, so I can tell the truth, and the real story behind the Cuban lives.

Erwin Chemerinsky:
In November of 2019, Ann Coulter came to speak on the Berkeley campus. Some who went to hear her were assaulted. They were punched and shoved, water was thrown at them, they were spit at. I remember then issuing a statement within the law school, saying that all ideas and views can be expressed on campus. If you don’t like a speaker, a peaceful protest is appropriate. If you don’t like a speaker, invite your own speaker.

But it’s inappropriate to punch, or shove, spit at those who are going to hear a speaker. I got substantial pushback from some of the students. They posted on every bulletin board in the law school, “Dean Chemerinsky stands up for Ann Coulter but not for the students.” And yet I think that they missed an important point. If we’re going to be a campus, views have to be able to be expressed that we dislike as well as we like.

The only way your speech or my speech will be secure tomorrow is to protect the expression of views that we don’t like today. We don’t need the first amendment to protect what we want to hear. That would occur anyway. We need the first amendment to protect the speech we don’t want to hear.

And there’s always going to be a tension between wanting to be open and allowing speech, and the reality that speech can be destructive and harmful to students as well.

Juana María Rodríguez:
I think one of the things that the university can do is be an incubator for ideas. In my classrooms, we get to take an idea and push it until it falls apart. And so, very often, those are the places where we think about the tensions between individual and community, where we think about what it means to negotiate different, sometimes conflicting needs live and in person, in a space.

We need to bring the ideas that maybe aren’t so great. We need to see them fail. We need to try on ideas and see where they take us. I think the idea of being intellectually curious about the world, reading promiscuously—I am an ethnic studies scholar, and I really take in information from all the disciplines. I love literature, art, performance, but I also think about sound, and texture, and the fabric arts, and textiles.
And I think each one of these things is a different way to see the world, to engage the world. And so I think the university becomes this wonderful place of exploration, that’s also where we are really exploring our own values, our own sense of what we hold dear, what we’re not willing to let go of.

Tradition & Values

Charles Hirschkind:
Tradition allows you to get at the way in which we depend on each other in creating conditions that uphold a valued form of life. Think about generosity, charity, modesty, humility, all of these very classic religious virtues. Those are ones that sustain relationships and create positive conditions of relationships by which people craft a valued and sustained form of life.

So by highlighting tradition, it focuses on the ongoing project of securing the interdependencies by which our lives are held together, and therefore by which our communities are created and sustained.

Courtney J. Cook:
We are opening the door for other folks to also see their experiences reflected, or find a connection in some way that ties everything together. So seeing the individual as a reflection of the community, and vice versa, the community as a whole, it also reflects on the individual, those things being connected.

We going to put in those truths from my ancestors. We going to do the hard work of understanding and undoing racism. And we going to fold in the sweet spirit of change.

Liberty & Equality

Elizabeth Rodriguez:
I didn’t have permission to even question it, because in Cuba, I wouldn’t even dare to—

Magdelys Savigne:
—Explore.

Elizabeth Rodriguez:
… to explore it, because it was so taboo. And people are—there’s so much shame around it.

Magdelys Savigne:
Yes, Cuba, it’s very open about sexuality, and talking about sex and everything.

Elizabeth Rodriguez:
Heterosexual.

Magdelys Savigne:
But straight. As long as it’s straight, you can talk all around about anything you want. But, gay? Forget it. And the only people growing up that I saw that were allowed to perform that sexuality were men.

Erwin Chemerinsky:
There’s always a tension between liberty and equality. Any law that prohibits discrimination limits the freedom of people to discriminate. But our society for decades has made the choice that it’s more important to stop discrimination than protect freedom to discriminate. This is the first time in history the Supreme Court has ever said there’s a first amendment right to discriminate in violation of anti-discrimination laws.
And it’s not just going to be for gay and lesbian individuals. If, for example, a web designer said, “I don’t want to design websites for interracial couples, or for Muslims who are getting married,” they would have the right to do it.

Mame Diarra Speis:
When we think about sex and gender, we think that these are individual things, that sex is something very private that we do within the context of our home. But, really, gender and sex are incredibly public things that have far-reaching public implications, whether it’s about how bathrooms are organized, how different locker room spaces, how athletics are organized, but also, how prisons are organized, how senior centers are organized. And these are all places where sex and gender become regulated. So I think sex is one of these places where we think about who we are as individuals and then that encounters the world. And the world doesn’t always see us the way we see ourselves.

Right now there’s so much anxiety, and really fear around questions of gender, and really attacks on the transgender population where people want to be seen as who they feel they are, and they’re encountering a community that wants to impose something else on them.

Spirituality & the Science of Awe

Dacher Keltner:
It’s so funny as a scientist to study awe, because we start with these definitions that do some injustice to the phenomenon, but then we study the thing based on the definition. And awe is the hardest thing to define of anything I’ve ever studied.

We surveyed 26 countries. Our approach to all was just to have them write: “When’s the last time you encountered a vast mystery?” We got these stories coming in from around the world. They started telling stories of music, and listening to choir in a candlelit cathedral in Europe, singing in a choir in another country, listening to an Indian raga, dancing to music, music in Brazil.

It was everywhere. And the structure of the story felt the same, which was like, “Wow, there’s something about this experience. I get goosebumps, I tear up, I feel connected to other people around me. I feel awe.” And then, as a psychologist, I’m always interested in, how? How does that work?

And we’re so far from really understanding how—you produce these sounds, they hit your ear, they go through your brain, and, next thing you know, you’re transported. The obvious idea that it took psychologists a while to get to is it synchronizes us, it turns us into a collective. You just like—we start moving together, there are studies showing our brain pattern start synchronizing. Next thing you know, the boundaries start to dissolve, and you’re like, “Man, we’re all part of this.”

Taylor Mac:
What we’re trying to do with this show is explore some kind of queer spirituality without heterosexuality dictating what that is—explore some kind of gender spirituality, queer spirituality, without any kind of cis or dominant culture leading us.

And that’s really what it is. It’s really just about hanging out together and wondering together. And we just do it all with music. So I think of it a little bit like a reverse conversion therapy, that the whole idea is that we’re supposed to just make everyone more queer than they were when they entered.

I don’t think we have to do too much to convince people that they’re queer, or to invite them into an experience that is queer, because they already are. So sometimes it feels to me that when people ask me, “How can I make this show universal?” that what they’re saying is, “You’re too odd for everyone. So please help us sell tickets to straight people.”

I make work for queer people. And if the straight people want to come, please do. We will make you queer by the end of the evening. And we don’t really even do it. You do it. You do all the work yourself. All we do is sing songs.

Dacher Keltner:
When I ask people, “Tell me a time when music told you about what life means,” there’ll be one person who’ll say, “Oh, I was at a Garth Brooks concert, and I just started weeping about my life.” And then another person will say, like, “God, I saw this piece of classical music and I thought about who I am.” And I feel like that’s one of the great mysteries that may never be solved, is how it helps us discover who we are.