뉴질랜드 총리 저신다 아던 하버드 연설

뉴질랜드 총리 저신다 아던 Jacinda Ardern 하버드 대학교 연설 Speech

E oku manukura, nga pou haemata o te ngahere.

e Piko o Te Mahuri, tera te tipu o te rakau.

E tipu, e rea, Ka puta, Ka ora. Tena koutou katoa.

President Bacow, Provost Garber, governing boards and deans, and most importantly graduates.

 

In Te Reo Maori, the language of the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Jealand, I paid tribute to all of the esteemed guests who stand here in this great forest of knowledge.

I'm truly privileged to be here and I'm thank you for the honor.

There are some moments in life that make the world feel small and connected.

This is not one of them.

 

I'm used to walking into a room in New Zealand and knowing at least someone.

It is one of the beautiful things about a small country like my own.

And while this moment feels incredibly daunting to me right now, I do take comfort knowing there are around 30 New Zealanders studying here.

 

And statistically, at least one of them will be my cousin.

 

But then there are some moments that serve to remind you that despite distance, despite vastly different histories and experiences, there are many things that connect us.

In June 1989, the Prime Minister Pakistan stood on this spot and delivered the commencement address titled "Democratic Nations Must Unite."

She spoke about her journey, the importance of citizenary, representative government, human rights, and democracy.

I met Benazir Bhutto in Geneva in June of 2007.

We both attended a conference that drew together progressive parties from around the world.

Seven months later, she was assassinated.

Now there will be opinions and differing perspectives written about all of us as political leaders.

Two things that history will not contest about Benazir Bhutto.

She was the first Muslim female prime minister elected in an Islamic country when women in power was a rare thing.

 

She was a also the first to give birth in office.

 

The second and only other leader to have given birth in office, almost 30 years later, was me.

 

My daughter Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford was born on the 21st of June, 2018, Benazir Bhutto's birthday.

The path she carved as a woman feels as relevant today as it was decades ago.

And so too is the message she shared here in this place.

She said partway through her speech in 1989 the following, "We must realize that democracy can be fragile."

This imperfect, but precious way that we organize ourselves that has been created to give equal voice to the weak and to the strong, that is designed to help drive consensus. It is fragile.

For years, it feels as though we have assumed that the fragility of democracy was determined by duration.

That somehow the strength of your democracy was like a marriage.

The longer you'd been in it, the more likely it was to stick.

But that takes so much for granted.

It ignores that fact that the foundation of a strong democracy includes trust in institutions, experts, and government.

And that this can be bulit up over decades, but torn down in mere years, It takes for granted that a strong democracy relies on debate and dialogue.

And even the oldest regimes can seek to control these forums and the youngest can seek to liberate them.

It ignores what happens, when regardless of how long your democracy has been tried and tested, when facts are turned into fiction and fiction turned into fact, you stop debating ideas and you start debating conspiracy.

It ignores the reality of what we are now confronted by every single day.

 

Forgive me while I take a water break.

 

You know It's a nice crowd when a drink of water elicit appluause.

 

Now where I come from, we have a parliamentary representative democracy. Without giving you a litany of fun facts on New Zealand that you are unlikely to need again, here is the very brief version.

We have a mixed member proportional system which essentially means every vote counts and it's ensured that our parliament better reflects our communities.

Almost 50% of our parliament are women.

 

Almost 20% are Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand.

 

And our deputy prime minister is a proud gay man and sits among several other rainbow parliamentarians.

 

In the past 10 years, we have a passed laws that include everything from the introduction of gay marriage and the banning of conversion therapy, right through to embedding a 1.5 degree climate target into law, banning military style semiautomatics and assault rifles,

 

and the decriminalization of abortion.

 

These are significant issues and they have not been without debate and difference, but they are all examples of times where we have navigated times of deep change without, for the most part, leaving deep rifts.

But we have also seen the opposite.

Whether it's democratic elections that erupt into violence or the COVID crisis emerging and exposing mistrust of experts, institutions, and governvments. 

Western democracies are seeing it and experiencing examples, and New Zealand is no different.

Now I will admit feeling some trepidation entering a discussion on how we strengthen our democracies when this issue is so easily and wrongly distorted to being opposed to free speech.

But that fear is overshadowed by a greater fear of what will happen to our democracies if we don't act to firm up our foundatios, if we don't find once again our ability to argue our corners, yes, with the passion and fire that conviction brings.

But without the vitriol, hate, and violence.

If we don't find a way to ensure difference, that space where perspectives, experience, and debate give rise to understanding and compromise, doesn't instead become division, the place of entrenchment.

Where dialogue departs, solutions shatter, and a crevice between us becomes so deep that no one dares cross to the other side. 

We are at a precipice and rather than ask what caused it today, I want to talk about how we address it.

Now, I am not an academic.

I accept that the robes on this occasion aren't exactly truth in advertising.

Rather, I am a politician from Morrinsville.

As a point of geographic reference, it's right next to Hobbiton.

I'm not actually joking.

 

But in that small rural town of 5,000 people where I spent most of my formative years and will forever love for what it gave me, I lived in that important space that sits between difference and division.

I was rised Mormon in a town where the dominant religions were Catholic, Anglican, and rugby.

I was a woman interested in politics, left wing politics, in a region that had never in its entire democratic history elected anyone other than a conservative candidate.

Now these differences were a part of my identity but never a source of isolation.

But I am old and unquestionably, things have changed.

In fact, mine is the generation that sat on the cusp of the internet age.

I remember the first person in my school who had access to the internet.

Her name was Fiona Lindsay.

Her father was the local accountant.

After he shut the office for the day, we would get the key and log onto his massive desktop computers with screens so wide that the desks were tiered to fit the whole thing in.

It was the 1990s, the interface and even what we used the internet for in those days was different.

For a time, it was almost as if the directory for this vast landscape didn't exist.

It was a modern ham radio.

You would dial in and talk to someone, anyone.

It was a spontaneity of connection that, in some ways, mirrored real life.

But as opportunities to connect expanded, humans did what we have always done.

We organized ourselves.

Social media platforms were born, offering the promise of connection and reconnection.

We logged on in our billions, forming tribes and sub tribes.

We published our thoughts, feelings, and ideas freely.

We found a place to share information, facts, fiction, dressed up as facts, memes, and more cat videos than you ever thought possible.

We found a place to experience new ways of thinking and to celebrate our difference.

But increasingly, we use it to do neither of those things.

Now I doubt anyone here has ever created a group titled political views I disagree with but choose to enter into rspectful dialogue with to better understand alternative perspectives.

As humans we are naturally predisposed to reinforce our own views together with people like us and avoid that dreaded sense of cognitive dissonance.

We seek validation, confirmation, reinforcment, increasingly with the help of algorithms.

What we seek we are served, sometimes before we even know we're looking.

Now, I'm not here to argue that social media is good nor bad.

It's a tool.

And as with anything, it's the rules of the game and the way we engage with it that matters.

But social media matters a lot and perhaps much more than we thought.

On the 15th of March, 2019, 51 people were killed in a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The entire brutal act was live streamed on social media.

The Royal Commission that followed found that the terrorist responsible was radicalized online.

Now in the aftermath of New Zealand's experience, we felt a sense of responsibility.

We knew that we needed significant gun reform.

And so that is what we did.

 

But we also knew that if we wanted genuine solutions to the issue of violent extremism online, it would take government, civil society, and the tech companies to come together and change the landscape.

And the result was the Christchurch Call to Action.

And while much has changed as a result, important things haven't.

The time has come for social media companies and other online providers to recognize their power and to act on it.

 

That means upholding their own basic terms of service.

That means recognizing the role they play in constantly curating and shaping the online environments that we are in.

That algorithmic processes make choices and decisions for us, what we see and where we are directed.

And at best, that means that the user experience is personalized.

But at worst, it means the user experience can be radicalized.

It means that there is a pressing and urgent need for responsible algorithm development and deployment.

Now we have the forums for online providers and social media companies to work on these issues alongside civil society and governments.

And we have every reason to do it.

Let's start with transparency in how algorithmic processes work and the outcomes they deliver.

But let's finish with a shared approach to responsible algorithms because the time has come.

 

But the tech companies, they are only part of the answer.

What we do as individuals in these spaces matters too.

Our willingness to recognize our own preconceived ideas, the level of critique we apply to what we engage with, and how we uphold our basic sense of humanity when interacting with others.

There's a term that gets thrown around a lot.

Keyboard warrior.

It's used to refer to someone who makes aggressive or abusive posts online, often anonymously.

Now I like the name.

In my mind when I read something especially horrific on my feed, I imagine it's written by a lone person unacquainted with personal hygiene practices dressed in a poorly fitted super hero costume, one that is baggy in all the wrong places.

Now, keyboard warrior or not though, it's still something that has been written by a human.

And it's something that's been read by one, too.

Now I do my own social media, I always have.

After all, it is being described as the new town square.

But we all knnow that it's more than just news and information being shared these days.

Recently, I had the privilege of joining ex German Chancellor Angela Merkel on a panel.

Now I have long been in awe of her leadership, not least for her endurance.

She was in power for 16 years.

I once asked her how she managed it.

Her response was quote, "things have changed a lot."

In the panel discussion, she reflected on some of that change by commenting the quote, "In the old days, we had certain events that happened in societies and television reported it.

And next day, everyone talked about it.

Today even that simple act has changed.

What we consider to be the mainstream media outlets have proliferated, but ownership structures have not.

Mainstream media have layers of accountabilities and journalistic expectation that others who also present information to us, don't.

There is competition in advertising revenue with subscription services and paywalls, all to aid in the survival of the fittest.

With fittest now defined by how easy it is to monetize your content.

And in amongst all of that lies the fact, we're not talking about how we access information to inform debate, but whether you can call it information at all.

Now there are those far more learned than I who will argue where the source of the scourge of disinformation lies.

Within your own campus, you have those who will argue that the current problems of disinformation are not the result of algorithms or trolls but of, quote, "asymmetric media structures, " decades in the making.

I'm not here to argue either way because at its heart, what we're in the middle of is not really a new problem.

Thomas Rid argues that the modern era of disinformation began in the early 1920s during the Great Depression.

 In an era of journalism transformed by radio, newly cut throat and fast paced.

He goes on to argue that it's since come in waves, including in the mid 2010, with disinformation reborn and reshaped by new technologies and internet culture.

Others point to the acceleration of the information and disinformation flow that comes with each new technology that enables mass duplication and distribution, from photocopiers to cassette tapes.

The only thing that has changed is speed.

But as Rid concludesm either way, the stakes are, quote, "enormous, for disinformation corrodes the foundation of our liberal democracy, our ability to assess facts on their merits, and to adjust cause accordingly."

Now I accept the picture I'm painting may seem overwhelming and insurmountable and a little bit grim, but I'm an optimist at heart.

And while we cannot change everything about the environment we are in, we can change ourselves to build greater strength and resilience in spite of the headwinds around us.

And I see examples of that every day.

Leah Bell and Waimarama Anderson were two young students from a public school in New Zealand called Otorohanga College.

Now they couldn't understand why every young New Zealander didn't learn at school about New Zealand history, including New Zealand Wars, conflict between British and colonial troops and Maori in the 19th century.

Now, these two students pushed for change, presenting a petition to parliament, and they succeeded.

Next year for the first time, oru young people are universally learning about their past, their culture, and their history.

 

But what is important here is just not what our young people learn, but how.

In a disinformation age, we need to learn how to analyze and critique information.

Now that doesn't mean teaching mean teaching mistrust. but rather as my old history teacher, Mr. Fountain extolled, to quote, "understand the limitations of a single piece of information and that there is always range of perspectives on events and decisions."

Our history shows us the importance of this.

But so too does our presence.

You are and will always be surrounded by bias.

You will continue to be exposed to disinformation.

And over time noise you are surrounded by will probably only get worse.

And perhaps that is why, when your own constitution was adopted, Benjamin Franklin was asked what had been created and he replied quotes, "A Republic, if you can keep it."

If you can keep it.

Yes, diversity of voice and mainstream media matters.

The responsibility of social media matters.

Teaching our kids to deal with disinformation and the role we play as leadrs, it all matters.

But so do you.

How you choose to engage with information, deal with conflict, how you confront debate, how you choose to address being baited or hated.

It all matters.

In the overwhelming challenges that lay in front of us and our constant efforts to reach into the systems, the structures, the power.

Don't overlook the simple act that are right in front of you.

The impact that we each have as individuals.

To make a choice, to treat difference with empathy and with kindness, those values that exist in the space between difference and division.

The very things we teach our children but then view as weakness in our leaders.

The issues we navigate as a society, after all, will only intensify.

The disinformation will only increase.

The pull into the comfort of our tribes will be magnified.

But we have it within us to ensure that that doesn't mean we fracture.

We are richer for our difference and poorer for our division.

Through genuine debate and dialogue, through rebuilding trust in information and one another, through empathy, let us reclaim the space in between.

After all, there are some things in this life that make the world feel small connected.

Let kindness be one of them.

 

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처음에 나온 언어는 Te Reo Maori 언어라고 한다. 새롭다.

graduates는 그래쥬어츠.

들어보니 seven을 씨븐이라고 발음한다. every는 이브리.

 

토익에서 본 단어들이 보였다.