Nicholas Christakis discusses his book Blueprint, recounting the 2015 Yale costume controversy where he de-escalated student mob fervor by appealing to shared humanity against administrator Howard's infantilizing email. He argues that suppressing innate evolutionary traits like cooperation fails, urging listeners to broaden boundaries or focus on individual character rather than group identity. Christakis suggests bowing to dissenters improves ideas, noting society will rebound from current acrimony within five to ten years as the arc of evolution bends toward goodness. [Automatically generated summary]
Joining me today is a sociologist, a physician, a professor at Yale University, and author of the new book, Blueprint, The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.
I am happy to have you here, sir, but I'm depressed that I have to start the show the way I sorta have to start the show, and I suspect you know how I have to start the show.
I mean, I've been working the book for nine years and I knew when it was published that I would have to revisit those events from 2015, which, you know, were just a challenging period of my life.
Thankfully, in the past, I'm really glad to have it behind me.
She basically wrote a piece That said, it was a defensive free speech, and it was sort of worked around the Halloween costume idea that, you know, you should wear what you want, but you can try to be respectful of people, but, you know, we shouldn't have some sort of top-down version where people, you know, administrators or professors are telling students what to wear.
You offered her a bit of a defense on that, and now I'll throw to the clip.
We've been standing outside, literally, for at least five to six hours.
Between you and Holloway, between last night to now, we've been arguing with people who are not willing to be listened to for a long time and all I see from you is arrogance and ego.
I am sick looking at you.
I am disgusted watching Alex argue with you.
You are not listening.
You were disgusting!
*sips tea* *sips tea*
I don't think you understand that.
And before I wasn't, before I was not angry, per se, I was disappointed maybe?
I thought maybe there was room for an apology.
You've clearly told us that you do not plan to offer an apology for your words.
You left the meeting last night to go home and then tweet, do not interrupt me, to tweet from your Twitter and then the filament's Twitter.
You showed no remorse.
You tried to let your wife leave that conversation without having answered for herself!
That is disgusting!
That is sick!
And now- I wasn't angry before!
I was not angry before, but now I am actually angry, sir.
I really- Do not interrupt me.
I was not angry, and now I want your job to be taken from you!
I don't want you to have this job!
I am disgusted knowing that you work at Yale University, where I will get my degree!
Where I will look back and think I have to argue with you!
Don't do it.
Don't do it, sir.
Do not do it.
This is not the day.
You do not want to play this game with me.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
You don't want to play this game with me.
Okay?
Understand that.
Look me in my face, first of all, and understand that you are such a disappointment to this university, to your students, to yourself, to the things that you claim to agree with.
I was in the courtyard for two hours and 15 minutes, from 4 to 6.15.
About an hour of footage has been released from five or six different vantage points.
You showed one clip that's typically not the clip that's shown.
So many people put stuff online.
You can piece together the whole hour between five and six.
For the first hour that I was out in the courtyard, I listened quietly to the students.
You know, there's a lot of stuff that that young woman said that's just factually wrong.
She's alluding to an event that occurred the night before at the Afro-American Cultural House at Yale, where there was a huge event with hundreds of students.
It had been announced at the beginning that we would have to leave that event.
At the conclusion, it was—I can't remember the precise timing, but I think it was scheduled from 6 to 8.
My wife had to teach a class from 7 to 9 in the evening, so she told her students she'd be late, and we'd stay from 6 to 8.
And so I think what distressed me is I think at some point in the background of that footage that one of the administrators, actually the author, what happened is a man by the name of Burgewell Howard, had moved from Northwestern University to Yale
and had assumed a new position there.
And he had written an email—he had written a memo while at Northwestern
admonishing students not to wear offensive costumes.
And I should say for the record that many of the students that—
many of the costumes that he or anyone else would find offensive,
I, too, would find offensive.
I wouldn't like these costumes.
I'm well aware of the long history of racism in our society.
I'm well aware of the ways in which there's trafficking and certain cultural tropes that put down other groups.
I reject.
I have a very pro-immigrant policy.
I believe system.
I think that anyone can be an American.
I love the idea that we have open borders.
I mean, I have a whole set of beliefs that are around openness and welcome and inclusion.
Yeah, I am quite a lefty.
I am a lefty.
I'm left of center play.
I mean, I have some conservative ideas, some libertarian.
I think of myself as a classical liberal, and I think of myself as very pragmatic in policymaking.
So I like markets to address most allocation of goods, but I also am very concerned about market failures, and then I want government intervention.
So anyway, that man who then had moved to Yale, and then he took out of mothballs this email that he had sent at Northwestern five or ten years earlier, got a bunch of Yale administrators to sign it, and then sent it off.
And in it, he had links to approved and non-approved costumes.
The very costumes which were deemed to be offensive, in his email, there were links to lots of those ostensibly offensive costumes.
And the students, there had been a lot of conversation at the time The New York Times had a big piece, like the previous month, about the growing use of Halloween costume advice at American colleges.
So it was in the Zeitgeist.
This was the third—his email was the third email that had been sent out telling students, giving them advice.
So in my wife's class, many of the students in the class and other students in the college where we—the subpart of Yale that we were responsible for—had told her that they felt this was very infantilizing.
they didn't really need advice on what to wear. And so my wife from a
developmental perspective wrote a response to this email which itself had
been was signed by 13 administrators. It didn't, it was framed as guidance but it
sort of had the color of law. And so she wrote a response saying, and her
intellectual point was, not wear whatever you want.
Her intellectual point was, do you students at Yale in your 20s, early late teens, early 20s, really need older adults to tell you what to wear, provide you guidance?
You should think about that and decide whether you really, and apparently many students did want such guidance.
And so then I was, then thereafter, then all hell broke loose and I was in that courtyard and did the best I could.
That was the one that I think we showed here, and I think that's the most viral.
But I thought that one was interesting because the angle was a little different, and you could see some of the other kids, and you know, either tears or the look of horror, all of these things, when you actually didn't do anything.
I mean, many people have analyzed those events, and honestly, I don't know if I have anything to add to those analyses.
I think that the thing that was very interesting to me So one of the ideas that I've been thinking about for a long time is this tension between our individuality and our groupishness.
And we have evolved to, first of all, it's a very interesting idea, we've evolved to be individuals.
So we humans have unique identities.
So we have unique faces.
So you can look at a sea of people and can tell who's who.
And not only do we have the ability to signal our uniqueness, we use our faces for that, but we have the cognitive apparatus to detect that uniqueness.
So you can have a lot of brain power that you allocate to tell who's who.
So this ability to be individuals is crucial for our ability to function in groups.
It's very paradoxical because you need a capacity to tell who's my offspring, who's my friend, who do I reciprocate kindness to, who do I cooperate with, who's my enemy, all of these things.
So all of these capacities of individuality are crucial to our collective expression.
our ability to live together.
But equally, we have this desire to surrender ourselves to the group,
to do something called to de-individuate, to form a part of a collectivity, to suppress our
individual desires, which also allows us to work together.
But the irony is when you get too much of that, you get mobs.
You get panics.
You get, you know, all kinds of collective phenomena that are destructive rather than constructive.
So when I was in the crowd, when I was in that mob, I knew what was happening.
I could tell.
So one of the things I started doing was I started asking people, What's your name?
And I was trying to connect to them person to person, saying, you know, Hi, I'm Nicholas.
Who are you?
So you're a person and I'm a person.
You're not a part of this mob.
You're a human being and I'm a human being.
And in fact, the one thing that happened that is an intellectual idea that's part of this book that I've been working on for 10 years, but that also I made in the heat of the moment, is in the moment I said to the students, I said that I believe in our common humanity.
I believe that even though this person and this person is superficially different than me, nevertheless we can talk to each other.
We all have life experiences.
We're human beings.
And then if you don't believe that, if you don't believe we have a common humanity, which I see as a wonderful thing.
And I honestly, I think that's one of the most depressing things that's happened that I've ever seen, actually, is that the Yale students in the 21st century would jeer at what I regard to be a fundamental, humane, wonderful claim about human beings, is that we have a common humanity.
I'm going to kind of get us there and then bring us back.
But that look that you're talking about, when you say that, like we have to be able to share common humanity, I've been there, too.
I mean, I face these mobs, too, and what I find is there's an actual look they have in their face where the individual that you just spoke about is gone.
Did you think there was anything, so I guess there's really, in that case, for the people that are watching this that think that one day they're gonna go against the mob, is there any other advice you would have for them on how to do it?
Because that doesn't always work.
I mean, saying, I've done that, where I've said, I'm standing right in front of you.
Mass movements are always dangerous, but my point is that I think that if you can keep your calm, you can think clearly about what you're saying.
Also, if you've thought about these ideas before, in the cool of the day, so it's not the heat of the moment, say, like, I've really thought about these ideas.
This is not just a sudden heat of passion.
I thought about this topic or this point.
Whatever it is, it doesn't have to be a political point.
It can be a scientific point or something.
Then when you're pressed, you know, you can say, you know, I'm listening to you.
Here's what I think.
Okay, what do you think?
I think you can, I won't say you can win the battle of ideas, but you can at least fight it well.
I see, you know, this was not my area of expertise.
I'm a natural and social scientist.
I run a lab with computer scientists and molecular biologists and sociologists and evolutionary biologists and we work around the world.
We do all kinds of stuff.
So I have always been committed to liberal principles, including to free speech.
When I was at Harvard, before I moved to Yale in 2013, my wife and I came to the defense of minority students who were having their speech rights squelched on campus.
So I'm committed to these ideas, but it wasn't the most central part of my life.
And I'm not an expert like John Haidt or Greg Lukianofar.
However, so I see conflicting evidence.
I agree with you that there are a lot of these salient cases which Which they weren't before.
And Jonathan feels that they're still rising, and they have their own theories, Jonathan and Greg, about why.
I see other evidence that looks at surveys of college students and finds that they are no more or less likely to want to suppress the speech of others than adults, than older adults.
It's very tempting to silence people who you don't agree with, right?
I mean, everyone wants to do that.
Or, I don't, I want to talk to them and persuade them.
It's very tempting to like, you know, Shut the anti-vaxxers up.
Prevent them from speaking.
But that doesn't win, right?
That's not a victory.
What we need to do is persuade them.
Why do you think this?
So if you compare college students to adults, some evidence suggests they're not more sanctimonious.
Some evidence suggests they are.
Some polls, if you look at disinvitations, they're clearly rising, but they're still small.
So the critics say there's a rising level of disinvitations, which I deplore.
Can I go on a digression?
Yeah, go.
Let me be very clear, because there's a lot of sloppy thinking about this.
Nobody has a right to speak on a college campus.
So I'm not claiming that anyone has a right.
But once a group on campus invites you to speak, you cannot yield to the mob for a disinvitation.
It totally destroys the university.
It's the antithesis of what a university should be like.
So you can protest that person, but you cannot have disinvitations.
That's just ridiculous.
So those have been rising.
So the critics say, look, disinvitations have been rising.
But the defendants say, yes, but millions of talks take place and nobody objects.
So it's a tiny minority.
So to answer your question, I don't think we're beyond the hump, but I'm not the expert to tell you how bad is it.
Does it say something about the state of liberalism or in a way that this was sort of the end conclusion of liberalism, I hate to say it, that it would get sort of usurped by progressivism or whatever the new collectivist idea was?
In other words, liberals are Tolerant liberals generally are live and let live, so it was sort of fertile ground for people with bad ideas to rush in and kind of take over, where perhaps conservatives are a little harder to get in at.
Yeah, so I mean, I think this is, I mean, I think, you know, the open society and its enemies, you know, I think there is a sense in which you can use the tools to destroy the foundation.
But I also think, and this is one of the arguments that I made, and I actually believe politically, which is that these very core commitments to freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, which the students were using right now, they were also engaging in harassment, which is a different topic.
And because I was an actor in those events, I didn't feel at liberty to help the students see the difference between freedom of expression and harassment, right?
Explains why, you know, so you can, so the classic example is the, you know, is that, you know, you can, you can march through the streets of Skokie, Illinois, but you can't stop in front of my house.
Right.
Right?
Because, you know, that is a threat.
the political expression in a public place is not.
Yes, yes, liberal principles, which the students in some ways were using, right?
Except to call for people to be fired for expressing their ideas on a collared campus is using these principles, but to illiberal ends.
And this is what you're asking, I think, which is what you're saying is can these tools be used to like degrade the... And the answer is yes, there is a kind of threat from within, but I still wouldn't abandon the principles.
All right, so it's called, Blueprint, The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.
So let's start with the tag there.
So we actually live in a good society?
I can't believe it.
I thought we live in the worst society ever and I thought capitalism is evil and the patriarchy and so many terrible things and we've done horrible things.
Yes, okay, so I think there has been a long tradition in the sciences and in the public domain as well of focusing on the bad side of human nature, on our propensity for tribalism or selfishness or violence or hatred.
But equally, our natural selection, our evolution, has equipped us and shaped us for love, and friendship, and cooperation, and teaching, and all these other wonderful qualities.
And in fact, I would argue that these good qualities and their benefits must necessarily have outweighed the bad qualities and their costs.
Because if I came near you, I'm now speaking over evolutionary time, over tens or hundreds of thousands of years, if I came near you and you killed me, or filled me with lies, or otherwise injured me, I would be better off living separately.
So the fact that we live socially suggests that, on balance, the benefits of a connected life must outweigh the costs.
So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to push back at these claims that humans are inexorably evil.
And these arguments, I should say, are supplementary to the body of ideas that Steven Pinker and others have been advancing about the sweep of history.
So, where Steven is interested in historical forces, I'm interested... I think the book's over there somewhere.
So Stephen is arguing that basically since the Enlightenment, with the philosophical principles and the scientific discoveries of the Enlightenment, the world has been getting better.
And he's unquestionably right.
We are safer, less violent, healthier, live longer, wealthier, better off in every possible dimension.
And that is largely a product of historical forces.
But what I'm arguing—and technological forces—but what I'm arguing is that we don't just have to look to our history to find this goodness.
We can look to our prehistory.
And actually, over tens of thousands of years, we've been shaped to be good.
We have been shaped to be able to live together in productive ways, in good ways—actually, in morally good ways, I even argue.
So they both work synergistically, these two forces.
And in fact, I would even argue that these historical and technological forces are actually just a thin veneer on top of much more powerful forces.
I'm trying to quickly call the literature to my mind.
If I had to speculate on what the conclusions of that literature would be, it would be that there's more advantage to paying attention to bad news than good news.
That the fitness advantage, the survival advantage, the advantage to your well-being, From noting a fire in your vicinity, or a predator, or a killer, is more advantageous to you than noting on average the presence of water, or a food, or a kindly person.
So when you described yourself as an optimist before, if you had to try to parse that out between what you think human nature is versus upbringing and everything else, could you give it some percentages?
So do you think societies should be organized to help these institutions?
I mean, this is where I could throw out Jordan Peterson's enforced monogamy line.
And, you know, people had a field day with that, and all he really was saying was that societies should kind of look at marriage as a decent thing, because it's a foundational thing that will help you build a family and help you build a full life.
Do you agree that that's part of what would lead to a good society, or what should be instilled Well, I talk about that in the book.
What I talk about is that we should be very wary of efforts to engineer society in opposition to our evolved proclivities.
So, societies that try, for example, to prevent loving attachments.
I talk about communes, for example.
Communes have a problem because in a commune, they want you to feel loyalty to the group, to the commune, so therefore feeling a love for your partner is a threat.
So, many communes have gone to opposite extremes, both of which are attempting to solve the same problem.
So on the one hand, you have the shakers, who say, no sex, no loving attachment.
On the other hand, you have communes that say polyamory, everyone loves everybody, or can have sex with everyone.
Both of those are attempting to sever an individualistic connection between two people.
And the same thing happens in Eastern Germany, where they try to sever connections with friends, right?
My friends could be spying on me or ratting me out to the Stasi.
Wait, it's worth sitting there for a second, because it's a fascinating idea.
The same force at work, whether you say to people, don't have any relation, is actually the same force as have relations with everyone.
I mean, that's not something that the average person is thinking about, but if you're just having relations with everybody, you're actually having relations with nobody.
So both of those extreme strategies are tackling the same problem, which is the threat to the collectivity of individual relationships, whether it's with your partner, your sexual partner, or as I was about to say, with your friends or others.
So collectivist societies will often have everyone call you comrade.
So everyone is your friend.
Same as having polyamory, right?
It's like the polyamorous equivalent to everyone dresses the same, we all call each other friend, no individual identity.
It's a kind of science fiction dystopia, actually.
So the argument I make is that we should be very wary of efforts to engineer society in opposition to our interests.
They're bound to fail, is my argument.
Now, there are brief moments of time and certain cultures where you can apply a tremendous cultural force and suppress some of these innate tendencies.
So, for example, I talk about the Na.
So, if you look at societies around the world, the expression of love for your partner is seen universally, except perhaps with one exception, which is the Na people in the Himalayas, Who have organized society around brief sexual encounters.
You're not supposed to love your partner.
And so this is a matrilineal society, the women stay at home, the men will go out at night, basically cruising for dates.
So they'll be like, and it's not uncommon for every woman to have had sex with every man in the village.
And the men will be knocking on the door, take me tonight, take me, and she'll pick this guy tonight, and they'll have a brief fling, maybe he can come back, and at any moment, either of them can break off the relationship.
There's a whole complex cultural edifice.
Marco Polo describes this when he gets to China.
The Chinese government thought it was sapping productivity, that everyone was having sex all the time.
They were saying, we need to stop this.
They tried to stamp it out, but it still has existed, this cultural set of rules.
But even in this society, there are people who want the forbidden fruit having a committed relationship and who flee for because
they want to be with each other forsaking all others so even this society cannot
fully suppress this desire for love and I look also at friendship and show that
there are some societies very few which seem to have no experience of this
notion of friendship but those societies are extremely rare and also have
certain idiosyncrasies So, would the simple way of saying that be that there's basically an evolutionary force that no matter how far you go to one extreme, it has to sort of push you
Yes, or that it's extremely difficult to entirely suppress.
You can through force of arms, you know, you can slaughter populations, you can, you know, you can have very elaborate sort of autocratic governments, you can have procedures or other highly evolved stylized cultures that have caught into this.
For example, play is universal in children, and there's one society, the Baming people,
who really think play is awful, and really try to suppress the innate tendency
of children to play.
So there's very little play among children in that society.
But these societies are rare, and they require very large cultural forces
That you're saying at some point, and whether Jonathan Haidt says it's two years down the road or whatever it is, that at some point it will eventually have to rebound, right?
So how do you navigate through a messy time like this?
If you're someone that's just kind of awake to these ideas and you wanna be able to express your individuality, but there is a mob or an amorphous machine that is silencing things.
Or as you just said before, that you don't want a society that's gonna push down things that were sort of always accepted for a long time.
I'm slightly paraphrasing.
But so right now, it's like, if you call a man a man, they'll tell you you're a transphobe.
These basic things that seem now, we hear about them constantly as if this is just the most important thing happening.
No, I think there are other, this is the other thing, I think that, I think there are certain segments of Twitter and certain segments of our society that have made these particular topics and others very central.
And everyone, you know, there are people who want to, who are concerned about climate change, there are people who, as I am, there are people who are concerned about the private prison industry, as I am.
These are two hot topics at Harvard right now.
So there was a heckler situation where the president of Harvard was not allowed to speak about, he was at an educational conference, and these groups that were opposed to private ownership of prisons, which I am, and concern about climate change, which I also am,
they shut the president down, which is ridiculous.
Because they thought he wasn't paying enough attention to their concerns.
So you have this kind of rule by minorities, right?
Where a vocal minority can hijack the conversation about whatever particular topic they have.
So everyone's entitled to have their topics of interest, but that doesn't mean you have to go along with it, right?
You can have your own ideas about the topic, or you can switch conversation.
Like, I'm not interested in talking about trans rights today.
Today I'd like to talk about how motor vehicle accidents are one of the leading killers, or the opioid crisis is another important dilemma.
Or the guns.
You know, we have more people are killed by guns in our society per capita than any society in the world, almost.
It's craziness.
So all of these are different.
People are different.
Anyway, the point I'm making is that if you wish to engage in a conversation with someone about a topic they feel strongly about, I think it's incumbent on you to listen to their arguments, think, And then respond.
So do you think there's an evolutionary reason that people either basically become sort of government people or freedom people?
So the way you were laying out that argument a second ago, it's like you were telling me your progressive sort of cred, which I have to do all the time, but then you basically said, yeah, but all these things can be accomplished by libertarianism if you don't believe that it's the government job to give these things.
So that basically it sort of shows why The progressives are the ones screaming on campus all the time, and in larger society, because they think the system can be perfected to get it however they want it, where the libertarians, I think, just say, I don't believe the system.
For example, children that listen to their parents might be more likely to survive.
So listening to your parents is actually a good survival strategy.
On the other hand, too much obedience is also bad.
You can be led like a lemming off a cliff, so occasionally you need to not listen to what everyone else is doing.
So both are advantageous, and we're equipped with both abilities, and there's variation across people, and it's a complicated topic, so nobody thinks there's like a genetic background to being a Democrat or a Republican, but there is evidence that there is a kind of genetic predisposition to certain political polls.
But what I would say, though, is that we live in a plural democracy, so you're going to have to compromise.
You know, if you're a libertarian who thinks X, Y, and Z, and you're going to be in a society with other people who think different things, we have decided to come together as a people and vote to resolve our disputes.
And, by the way, not just to vote.
But to educate ourselves and to teach each other stuff, right?
To communicate, right?
The founders recognized that in order for us to get to the wisest decision, we have to have free and open conversation.
Well, I think that's why so much of what I do here, of course you do, but that's why so many people are so concerned about this at the college layer.
You know, I'll hear some of our critics We'll say, oh, they're just obsessed with what's happening on colleges and they're handing over all this power to the mob on colleges.
But then every day we see it then leak out.
And also these people will be the leaders of tomorrow.
That's why I don't think it's overestimating it, even if it is a small minority, which we agree.
The amount of power they can extend seems to be way disproportionate to the numbers.
We have century-long heights of income inequality in our society.
There's a big debate about whether that is an unavoidable side effect of growth.
Everyone is better off, so what do we care if the income is unequally distributed?
But I think, I tend to agree with the critics that are concerned that this level of inequality is not sustainable to have a common wheel, to like have a sense that everyone is a part of the society.
We've had no income growth in the middle, like the median American has seen in a generation has seen no growth in wages.
Right, so the bottom actually has raised, and we've watched the top go bananas, but the middle basically... No, the bottom hasn't even gone up that much either.
Right, so like a poor American today is vastly better off than a poor American a generation ago.
But in terms of wage growth, there's been very little growth, my understanding of statistics.
And most of the accumulation of wealth in the last generation has gone to the top, top 1%, top 0.1%.
Anyway, there's a debate about why that happened, a technological advance, do we have the same thing during the Industrial Revolution?
These are important, deep ideas which, as a society, we should be debating and be discussing.
What's the best for our society?
Anyway, these are all much more important topics, in my view, and have much more bearing on the well-being of our society than a lot of the other crap that gets so much attention.
So, the book—so I don't—I'm not—it's not a work of history, so I'm not—I don't
primarily talk about, like, the last 200 or even 2,000 years of human evolution or experience.
I'm much more interested in the long arc of our history.
And if you look at forager societies around the world, as I do, and you look at their qualities, you will see that again and again these societies have these desirable properties.
There's variation, of course, in how cooperative they are, and there's variation in marital systems, and there's variation in sustenance systems.
There's a lot of variation, but also there's a lot of commonality.
And those common features, I argue, are universal.
See, here's the other argument.
So the argument is that there are these universal qualities that are shared across all societies.
Our capacity to teach and to create environments in which we foster teaching and learning are crucial.
Anyway, also mild hierarchy.
We are a species that we cannot survive with no hierarchy.
We need some leaders, and I discussed that, but we also don't like too much hierarchy.
So when you get too autocratic a power, the guys down below band together and basically kill.
So Richard Wrangham has been making this argument that we self-domesticated as a species, that over millennia, bands of weaker members would say, you know, that guy's too powerful, and he's getting all the dates, and we're gonna kill him.
And basically they did.
So we got more peaceful as time went by is one of the ideas.
Mild hierarchy, in-group bias.
So some tribalism is unavoidable in human beings.
This capacity for identity that we discussed at the beginning.
These are all qualities.
So identity, love, friendship, social networks, mild hierarchy, in-group bias, teaching and social learning.
These are seen everywhere and they lie in, I believe, at the core of a good society.
And institutions Try to suppress those at their own peril.
I just told you all the reasons I love your culture, but let's pretend Yes, let's say it's roughly the same for you about your own culture How can you embrace all of those things without falling into the trap of identity politics because I think that's yeah So I think where a lot of people are at these days, okay?
So I have a couple of ideas in response that the first thing I would say is is that that this is one of the both the most It's still not totally clear how we evolved to have this
capacity.
It's felt that this in-group bias, this tribalism that we have, was crucial to our ability to
cooperate, that the ability to draw a distinction between us and them, that the challenge, the
problem that this ability that we evolved.
So whether we cooperate with each other and whether we are xenophobic or tribalistic or
draw distinctions between us and them, and this property, this tribalism property, is
a property that reduces the scale of interactions.
So instead of you having to cooperate with everybody...
You only cooperate with your guys.
And this is innate in human beings.
And it is felt that this ability to draw a distinction between us and them was crucial in the emergence of the very ability to cooperate with other people.
Okay?
So they're tied.
They're connected to each other.
What's depressing is, is it necessary to hate the other group?
Why can't you just love your own group?
Right?
So why could you be indifferent to the other group?
Or even admire it and say, that's them.
They're not us.
We like them.
Or we're indifferent to them.
Why do we have to kill them?
Where does the killing part come from?
And this is complicated.
We don't exactly know where the hostility comes, but we tend to see this hostility.
So, for example, there are famous experiments that have been done with little toddlers.
You can randomly assign toddlers to different t-shirts.
You can test that the toddlers understand that this was random, that there was no merit to whether they got the yellow t-shirt or the green t-shirt.
And yet, as soon as you give them the t-shirts, the yellow t-shirt kids say, those green t-shirt children, they shouldn't have toys.
So with the most trivial of interventions, you can elicit in us this dislike of the other.
This is not the only tool that evolution has given us to live together, this ability to draw the boundary between us and them.
There are a couple of other tools, and before I tell you what those two other tools are, let me just say one other thing.
So if you think of our society as here's our whole society, and here's our groups in the middle, and here are individuals at the bottom, if you're struggling with the problem of tribalism, there are basically two ways you can go.
You can go up a level, and broaden the boundary.
And you can say, for example, we are all Americans.
Right?
You can say, because we all have the capacity to draw the boundary, we were evolved to have that capacity, now you just say, actually these little group boundaries that we were paying attention to, they're not relevant.
If you come to our country and you work and are productive and obey our laws and our Constitution, you're an American as far as I'm concerned.
Didn't matter whether you came from Mexico or, you know, one of the four Mexican countries, as he said, you know.
Anyway, okay, so... A whole other show.
A whole other show, okay.
So, but another solution, okay, to the groupism, the tribalism, is to go down a level.
Remember we talked earlier about individuals.
So now you can say, instead of looking at people as which groups are they a member of, you look at them as individual people.
And this too has been a part of our history.
So Martin Luther King's famous sentiment, you know, I look forward to a society in which people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, is an appeal to our individuality.
See, groups don't matter.
Individuals matter.
So if we're struggling with tribalism, we can go up or we can go down.
Both help.
However, lateral to that point, there's another set of ideas, which is tribalism is not even the only tool we have in order to reduce the sense of scale and to cooperate.
So natural selection has also equipped us with friendship.
Friendship, one of the reasons it is felt we evolve the capacity for friendship, is again to reduce the sense of scale.
So instead of now I'm being in a big group, everyone has to cooperate with everyone, each of us has a subset of people who are our friends that we cooperate with.
So it's similar to tribalism but different, because now instead of defining it by a group membership, it's defined by each person has their particular friends.
So this is another tool that we innately have that we can use to sustain our cooperative instincts and push aside the tribalism.
Well, I don't think... Okay, so I do believe in free will.
I mean, I think you have some capacity to self-mastery and make your own decisions in life and your own, you know... But you're also born with certain innate qualities and you're also born a human being, which is you're part of a particular species that has a particular set of characteristics.
So, I think that as individuals, you know, we have some control over how we act.
I don't think our individual actions will individually change the whole society, but I think if each of us is attempting to do the right thing, I think ultimately that makes things better.
Look, there's a lot of famous ideas.
So, Viktor Frankl, who was in the concentration camps, his wife was killed, he survives the Nazi concentration camps, and he writes a famous book called Man's Search for Meaning, after he's liberated.
He writes it ten days after his liberation.
And he talks about how he came to the recognition that even in this camp, in the most vile possible circumstances, where his life was threatened every day, where people were dying all the time, he was starving to death, he had no shoes, it was in the winter, I mean, he was a slave.
Even there, he recognized that he was the master of his own internal state.
You know, that how he saw the world was something that was in his own control.
So he was able to find a sense of self-discipline and mastery, even in an environment in which the structures around him were engineered to crush him, to kill him.
So I think that there are many examples of this.
I mean, another one of my favorite examples is Buddhist monks that were studied at MIT years ago. I think
I'm gonna get the facts of this were correct so so so they were very interested in how
meditation changes the structure of your brain and How are these monks so able to be so peaceful in?
these very stressful circumstances and And they scanned them, they put them in the MRI scanner and they looked at different parts of their brain and which parts were enhanced or diminished compared to other more ordinary mortals.
And they saw that different parts of the brain in Buddhist monks were different than the rest of us.
But what interested me was not even the neuroanatomical discoveries that were in that paper, but it was the interviews with the monks.
And so what the monks would say was that, for example, let's say you and I are in traffic and someone cuts us off.
A normal response, certainly one that I often have, is, who is that jerk?
You know, you'd be really pissed off, and your blood pressure would rise, and maybe you'd race that guy, and you know, you would think ill of them.
That would be your natural go-to thing.
That's a thoughtless, maybe they're idiotic, or they're inattentive, or you would have all these bad thoughts about this person who, you know, in a road rage kind of way.
The monks don't do that.
What the monks do is they train themselves to re-narrate.
So when that happens to them, they say, Maybe that's a man who's taking his wife to the hospital because she's delivering a baby.
The baby's being born in the car in front of me.
Isn't that amazing?
There's a new life.
I should help that man to get to the hospital.
I mean, and they're doing it not for the sake of that person, but for their own well-being, you see?
So, I think it's possible to, even though it's difficult, it is very difficult, To exercise some internal self-control.
What else do you think sort of the average person that's watching this can do to help order a good society?
Because I think people, you know, everything's become so political these days that I think people think that's the only solution to sort of help make a better society.
We don't have to bring it back to that specific instance, but in general, because I think a lot of people are going through this, you're being berated by somebody, they're saying all the worst things about you, they're impugning your motives, they're attacking you as a person, all of those things.
I mean, Jordan and I have done this many times, where then, depending on how that hierarchical structure is operated, if you are saying something that's unpolitically correct, Well, I mean, you have to have the strength, or revise your opinions, or stick to them, or make good arguments, or listen, or don't engage.
Let's say you're a Trump supporter, you just don't want to lose your job, because you think if you say that, you know, just something as simple as that.
I'm against people losing their jobs for their opinions.
So I think there's a thing where I think a little bit of bravery, a little bit of civil discourse, A little bit of commitment to granting charity to our opponents.
A little bit of like, for example, when I would have an argument with people who are opposed to vaccination.
I think there is no merit to their ideas.
I understand they're fierce.
I understand that there have been either some actual cases of vaccine-induced neurological conditions, one in 100,000, one in 500,000 cases, which is awful.
And I understand that there are a lot of coincidences where people think that there's a relationship, but no, it's just that you have, you know, you have a lot of vaccines are being administered.
There are a lot of illnesses occurring.
There's going to be an overlap in those two sets.
But, and I also know the data on how that's very, how vaccination is like a 20th and 20th is actually more like even a 19th century triumph.
I mean, you know, we've, we've mastered these diseases.
We humans, it's astonishing what we've done through our capacity to teach and learn and engage in science and so forth.
But I would engage that person.
I would talk to them.
I would say, you know, let me talk to you about your beliefs.
And because I think that that's the only way to get them to revise their beliefs.
So I have not historically been very politically... Right, but what I'm getting at really is that at the moment it seems very obvious to me I don't know that I can be clear or anything.
On the center right, there is an ability and actually a desire to discuss ideas, agree to disagree, and that just isn't happening.
Right now, and I would suspect or argue, and I'm sure you can give me examples where that Yes, I mean, during McCarthyism, for example, I think, you know, it was very difficult to be a communist, for sure, and even, you know, left wing in the 50s.
If you actually think that someone believing in a different god and expressing that belief is violence, then the country justifies killing that person.
Or in Brunei recently, they had the same kind of situation.
I strongly reject that belief.
We have different words and there's a totally different meaning between speech and violence.
So I think there are groups of people on campus who do conflate speech and violence.
I think that's a problem.
But there are also many groups that are very, very vigorous political debates.
I think one thing that is different So, I'm in my 50s.
When I was in college in the 80s, we would stay up late and argue about politics with our friends.
Mill's famous saying, you know, he who knows only his side of the case knows little of it.
So, you know, I think I think that's where your ideas get better when they are tested.
When you argue with someone you disagree with.
And I think cultivating those kinds of conversations, disciplining yourself to be able to have arguments with people you disagree with, improves your ideas.
And actually, you should be grateful to that person.
They're a more interesting person in some ways.
Now, you don't have to be best friends with that person necessarily, although you can be.
Well, I would say, I mean, yeah, what I would close with saying, you know, I really believe that the arc of our evolution is long, but it bends towards goodness.