On Thursday, December 18 at 5 pm Eastern Time, Nicholas A. Christakis, Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, will join us for a Casual Conversation. You will have an opportunity to meet and speak with one of the leading sociologists and evolutionary biologists in the country. And you will come to understand why on Monday, December 8, Dartmouth Provost Santiago Schnell told us at a Casual Conversation how much he admired Professor Christakis. If you want to better understand the future that President Beilock and Provost Schnell envision for the College, you would do well to participate in the upcoming session with Professor Christakis.
From the Professor’s website, https://humannaturelab.net/director :
Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is a social scientist and physician at Yale University who conducts research in network science, biosocial science, computational social science, and various other fields. His current work focuses on how human biology and health affect, and are affected by, social interactions and social networks. Dr. Christakis directs the Human Nature Lab and is the Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, appointed in the Departments of Sociology; Statistics and Data Science; Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Biomedical Engineering; Medicine; and the School of Management.
Professor Christakis is the author of, among other works, of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (2019 Little, Brown Spark), which caught my attention by being discussed in a recent essay in SKEPTIC magazine by Michael Shermer, “Are There Political Truths.” I subscribe toSKEPTIC and admire Mr. Shermer, and my one experience with Professor Christakis convinced me that he is a man of decency and character, and someone to listen to. That experience was ten years ago when Professor Christakis was to participate in a discussion at the Buckley Institute’s annual program at Yale. Professor Christakis appeared and explained that he had to apologize but that he was without any sleep, was undergoing a terrible time, and could not be part of the program. It was only later that I discovered what had transpired, and what was done to his wife and to him was an example of intolerance and anti-intellectual bigotry that is shocking even today.
Professor Christakis did not have to appear in person: he could have sent his regrets through the organizers. But the fact that he chose to explain his absence in person was a demonstration of precisely those qualities that he both lauds and explains in Blueprint. I am not often in then position of quoting Frank Bruni, but this is what he wrote in a column in the NYTs:
[The book is] no lament for the mess that we humans make of things. It’s an argument that we’re transcendently and inherently good — that we’re genetically wired for it, thanks to a process of natural selection that has favored people prone to constructive friendships, to cooperation, to teaching, to love.
“For too long,” he writes in the preface, “the scientific community has been overly focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for tribalism, violence, selfishness and cruelty. The bright side has been denied the attention it deserves.”
In his book our guest describes what he calls “the social suite,” which is “[a]t the core of all societies”. The features of the social suite “work together to create a functional, enduring, and even morally good society.” “The universals of the social suite—shaped by natural selection and encoded in our genes—are not only facts, but also sources of our happiness. They are essential to the ability to judge which social arrangements are good for humans in the first place.”
In his last chapter, Professor Christakis invites us to consider both our immanence in a common human nature with the individuality that is part of human nature, that bounds our existence—and that cannot be fundamentally remolded upon the command of a Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot or even the founders of utopian societies—and the transcendence that brings us in relation to others and all of society. As he writes discussing Maslow’s use of the idea of transcendence: “The shipwrecked crews, for instance, were able to satisfy their needs for food, shelter, and safety precisely because they first honored and attended to their needs for friendship, cooperation, and learning. The latter were predicates for the former.”
That we are both immanent and transcendent was the last lecture conclusion in Philosophy 25 in Spaulding Auditorium over 50 years ago. Although in a different context (religious, not cultural), the analogous point is worth taking from our guest’s book: that we must be both in ourselves and part of a society operating out of the morally good, for we cannot thrive, or even long survive, in only place in life.
Come join me to spend time with a fundamentally good man who also sees humanity as fundamentally good.
Usual rules apply. Let me know if you plan to attend by emailing me at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com by close of business next Tuesday, December 15.
Arthur Fergenson