Influences
These are the big ideas that drive me.
A host of worthies
From Joan of Arc to Frederick Douglass to Steve Jobs, I’ve drawn great meaning and wisdom from the individual lives of great human beings.
Ever since I began reading, I have been reading biographies. Biographies of scientists, artists, statesmen, athletes, activists, businessmen—human beings of every age and clime.
Through biography, a medium that is inherently humanistic, I have been a consumer of human nature. As someone who believes deeply in the power of ideas—so much so that in my view, the inescapable alternative to seeing ideas as the causal engine of human action is to become a cynic about humanity—I nevertheless have learned more from biography than from any other source save direct interaction with other people.
While I love the individual in all her varied manifestations, I am particularly drawn to the individual who stands apart from her tribe. Not the contrarians necessarily, but those who choose their own path, and are therefore bigger than the accident of their circumstances.
The individual human life, fully lived, is an end in itself. This is the bedrock principle that grounds humanism, enables a celebration of our differences, and makes possible a defense of globalism. It is, I believe, the intellectual panacea that cures all, including the cultural wargames around identity; fully understood, it inoculates against the machinations of the avant-garde and the sophists. It is the ideal the world needs and deserves.
The work of individuals
My life is informed and enriched by the particular stories of so many individual men and women. But two people stand out as particularly influential—two revolutionary women who flourished in the 20th century, were loved and hated, and who dramatically transformed my life through their unborrowed vision.
Maria Montessori
Despite the widespread popularity of Montessori schools, Maria Montessori’s genius and legacy remains under-appreciated. Her personal story is epic, and her work is of the ages. She is to education what Plato is to philosophy, Newton is to physics, and Freud is to psychology—the first to systematize the field, and to lay a foundation upon which others can build. Above all, she has awakened in me a love of the fundamental goodness and the unbounded potential of the human child.
Ayn Rand
As with Montessori, Rand is on the one hand popularly known for her politics, while on the other hand completely undiscovered vis a vis her deeper views. In particular, Rand’s epistemology and meta-ethics offer original answers to the timeless questions of philosophy, and enable a fundamentally different lens on the world. Above all, she has awakened in me a love of fundamental goodness and the unbounded potential of the human adult.
Different cultures
Human values manifest as and in cultures, and I’ve had the fortune of immersing myself directly and indirectly in many cultures. Whether the experience of the industry and unleashed human energy of the Shanghai of ten years ago, or the informal comparative inquiry I did comparing the cultures of hip hop and country music (both of which I love), or the deep dive into the solemnity and gallantry of the Arthurian legends of the middle period, I’ve learned a lot about myself and about human nature by studying and experiencing human culture in its varied forms.
Three cultures stand out as particularly important and core to my formation:
Antiquity: The glory of Greece and grandeur of Rome
From studying the philosophers, to reading great authors like Mary Renault, I am about as old-school as it gets in being a lover of antiquity. So many of the great values of my life were born in that time and place, and so much of my thinking has been shaped by the works of that age. At my core, I want to be an Athenian, for in the high culture of Athens I find almost everything I love about human greatness.
The Enlightenment and its legacy: humanism and globalism
The two great distinguishing features of the Enlightenment, and coincidentally of Higher Ground Education, is the appreciation for (1) the centrality of reason and knowledge in human life, and (2) the centrality of agency and personal choice in human life. Enlightenment values are, by and large, my values—the respect for the dignity of the individual, the humility before the evidence of science, the hubris of thinking that knowledge can be channeled to serve the human good, and the belief that through education and growth, the human being can achieve nobility of soul.
Sikh Punjabi history and culture
I grew up in a Punjabi-Canadian household that practiced Sikhism, and have had a lifelong interest in both the ways in which an abiding spirit of Punjabi secularism interfaces with the dogmas of Sikh religion, and more generally in the history of the Sikh people. The “live and let live” ethos that permeated the emergence of Sikhism, as well as its intellectual identity as a resistance movement, led me to an early, implicit sympathy towards causes that value freedom of conscience. And the warrior-saint archetype remains a deep ideal in my psychology (recast as the businessman-intellectual). With respect to modern Punjabi culture, so many of the things that make me who I am—from a veneration of hospitality as a value, to a love of stiff drinks— come from my observations of the people and customs I grew up around.