The Public Culture Project, housed in Harvard’s Division of Arts & Humanities, aims to revivify our shared public life by placing existential, moral and even spiritual questions at the center of our public conversations. We want to mine the deep insights, traditions and longings of our fellow citizens, and inspire current and future leaders to develop and advance beautiful, humane visions of who we are, and what we can become together. 

Why Public Culture?

By many measures, we live in a moment of cultural disintegration. Here in America, trust in our institutions and one another has been plummeting for decades. Polarization has skyrocketed, and cross-partisan conversation has come to seem all but impossible. Rates of loneliness, anxiety, depression, drug overdose and suicide are on the rise. A recent Harvard study found that a majority of young adults report lacking a sense of meaning and purpose that could give shape to a life, or to a shared vision of society. Many of our most valued and powerful institutions seem bereft of leadership or vision. In the midst of all this wealth, technology and information, it feels like we are adrift, and possibly coming apart. 

The belief that our public life can be guided by simply “following the numbers” - whether in the form of big data, share price or algorithms - has left our public life feeling sterile and inhumane, and opened the door to destructive and even violent ideologies. We believe that the time is right for people of good will to re-engage perennial questions about the human condition, the shape of a good life, who we are as a people, and who we want to become. We want America’s oldest university to play host to these kinds of conversations, which are so badly needed in our time and place. 

What We Do

The Public Culture hosts regular public conversations, bringing prominent leaders from government, business, technology, religion, medicine and media into conversation with thinkers from the arts and humanities. Our project is deliberately cross-partisan, welcoming good-faith thinkers and leaders from across the ideological spectrum to engage philosophical, moral and even spiritual questions in an honest, open, creative spirit. We are especially interested in groupings that will catalyze generative, surprising, open-hearted conversations. We might, for instance, pair a Democratic Senator with a Republican Governor, or a tech visionary with a spiritual leader, to engage deep and broad-ranging questions like the following: 

• What are education and work for? As we continue to build the capacity of AI, what sort of learning and jobs do we want for our children? 
• Why are men and women drifting apart, in education, work and politics? What do we want gender relations to look like? 
• How central are religious or philosophical beliefs and practices to a flourishing life and a solidaristic society? Might we see another Great Awakening? 
• What moral principles are shaping our economic life? Are they the principles we want? 

This project also has an inward-facing aspect. We want to open these important questions for the students we are charged with educating, so that they can take them with them into their lives and careers.