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Coursera: Reflections on the Paris attacks from Coursera CEO Rick Levin
Friday night’s horrendous attack on Paris fills us all with grief and dismay. We grieve for the victims, their friends and families, and we are dismayed that the communities we have built and the human connections we cherish can feel so suddenly vulnerable. History teaches us that extremism – insistence that one is in possession of the unique truth – leads to suffering. Years ago, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin identified the dangers of “the pursuit of the ideal.” Those who adhere to belief systems - religious or secular - that claim absolute certainty about what is right and wrong are almost inevitably drawn to persecuting those who hold other perspectives. The extremism that motivated the events in Paris, 9/11 in New York, and other recent conspiracies across the Middle East and Africa is not unique. It has many precursors – from the Inquisition, to the witch trials of colonial New England, to the mass executions that sparked World War…