Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, by Nicholas Christakis
Yale’s professor Nicholas Christakis became inadvertantly infamous owing to his starring role in a YouTube video shot when he was Master at Silliman College and confronted by irate Yalies over a memo his wife had written. “The Halloween tape” was, and is, shocking in its illiberal and assholic attacks on Christakis. The shock is heightened by his calm, reasoned and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to engage in a conversation with the students.
I have assembled many materials and commentaries on the Halloween affair and debated about publishing it here. Although the “Halloween affair” is complicated and has three sides to the story,** there is no doubt that it is an ugly chapter in recent Yale history, a chapter that makes NO ONE proud.
But despite that depressing display of human nature, Professor Christakis has produced a work of both laudable scholarship and material accessible by the general reader. Relying on his expertise in social networks and evolutionary biology, he concludes that humans are hard-wired for cooperation and moral behavior. The Amazon reviews and results (copied below) speak for themselves. If anyone is looking for a meaty book with some hopeful conclusions, here it is.
** Long Way Home, by Don Henley; Lyrics
Here in this telephone booth
There’s three sides to every story:
Yours and mine and the cold, hard truth
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Blueprint is a timely, powerful, and riveting demonstration of the inherent suite of sensibilities that drive our social life and cultural evolution. An authoritative integration of the social and evolutionary sciences, this engrossing work’s great achievement is to definitively shift the focus of social inquiry from what differentiates us to our common humanity, and to show that, while we may be primed for conflict, we are also hard wired for love, friendship, and cooperation, inviting us, should we choose, toward a humane society.” Orlando Patterson, author of The Cultural Matrix
Blueprint is highly original and engrossing. Christakis is a fluent and lucid writer with an arresting personal voice. At the heart of the book is what he describes as ‘the social suite’ — a set of cultural universals that constitute the core and the blueprint of all societies. Integral to the universality of the social suite is his contention that these key features of all human societies are shaped by natural selection and encoded in our genes. Christakis calls into question a false dichotomy between cultural and genetic evolution. Rather, he regards the two as co-existing in ways that recurrently intersect and influence one another. He shows that the similarities that exist between the social attributes of human and animal societies bind humans together in a way that heightens our common humanity. Blueprint is a richly interdisciplinary, deeply documented, brilliant opus on how our long evolutionary history bends toward a good society.” Renée C. Fox, University of Pennsylvania
“Blueprint is an exciting volume that constitutes a major scientific contribution of broad interest. It is a fascinating account of how genes and culture interact and how this knowledge provides the foundations for establishing a Good Society.” Ernst Fehr, University of Zurich
“Blueprint is an extraordinarily readable and entertaining book that is also one of the most profound among recently published books on evolution. It brings to bear a long history of research to show that cooperation and pro-social traits of humans are genetically based and are the result of evolution by natural selection. By doing this, Christakis corrects one the most frequent misperceptions about biological evolution, namely that inter-individual competition is a law of nature. I only wish this book would have been published decades earlier.” Gunter Wagner, Yale University
“In the media and online, we live with a daily barrage of the things that divide us — the differences among individuals, groups, and whole societies seem to define the ways we interact with one another. With a broad sweep of history and a deep knowledge of genetics and social science, Christakis takes us along a different path, one that is as important as it is timely. Whether in hunter-gatherer societies, small bands of people brought together by chance, or Silicon Valley corporations, our societies are linked by the common bonds of humanity. In Blueprint, Christakis shows how we are much more than divisiveness and division; we are programmed to build and thrive in societies based on cooperation, learning, and love.” Neil Shubin, author of Your Inner Fish
“Christakis takes us on a spellbinding tour of how evolution brings people together, setting the stage for our modern world where online networks connect people in new and unprecedented ways. Our genes don’t work in isolation; rather they equip our species with the capacity to join together and make great things. This powerful and fascinating book shows the fundamental good that lies within us, that connects us, and that helps us cooperate beyond the survival of the fittest.” Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz
“In this provocative book, Christakis makes a thorough and compelling case that we are hardwired to value goodness in our societies — and thus innately compelled to participate in building, strengthening, and enhancing the common good. In an era marked by polarization and rising inequality, Christakis marshals science and history into a message of hope.” Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab
“A blueprint for constructing a good society arrives when we most need it. Christakis has outrageous optimism, rooted firmly in biological and social science, that we will prevail. With a voice that is joyous and uplifting, he teaches us about the core of our nature — this obligatory patterning of ourselves into units called society, with the building blocks being love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. What an enlightened house this blueprint will build if we, the occupants, heed his message about the possibilities that lie within us.” Mahzarin R. Banaji, author of Blindspot
“One of the world’s leading social scientists is on the hunt for the biological bounds of human culture, for what we are capable of as a species, and for society’s generic tendencies. In this eloquent, wide-ranging book Christakis finds what turns out to be the good news about what it means to be human.” Gary King, Harvard University
“In this wisely optimistic book, Christakis explores the evolutionary imperative of forming bonds that are both cultural and genetic. His writing is colorful, personal, and often exuberant.” Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree
“Blueprint is a brilliant and provocative tour de force that could not be more timely. I don’t think I’ve learned this much from a book in a long time. Christakis is the rare author who can combine rigor and erudition with page-turning readability. Filled wit
To be fair to Nicholas Christakis, I haven’t read Blueprint yet, and I know that he and his wife Erika, who were at the center of the 2015 controversy, mean well. But I was there; I saw what unfolded; and I know how misleading story lines build on themselves until they seem to be “the truth” although they’re anything but. The story of the Christakises’ supposed martyrdom by politically correct hordes on the altar of free speech was crafted basically by Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, who shot the infamous video and whom the Christakises had hosted and befriended at Harvard in 2012, when they were heads of a residential house there and prompted some free-speech controversies then, too, as well. My point isn’t that they were totally wrong; far from it. What the Yale video showed was despicable and unacceptable — and the offending student has paid for it many times over. But, as Erika, — who generated another “Halloween costume” controversy years before coming to Yale — wrote in about another damning video in another context, a snapshot may be worth a thousand words, but it may also tell the wrong story. Here is my account of what actually happened in 2015. I urge everyone who has formed a judgment on the basis of that video to read it and consider what was going on outside of the camera range among a thousand undergraduates. Again, I don’t present it in order to assess Nicholas Christakis’ new work, although i consider his TED talk of last year pretty dreadful on “scientific” and emotional grounds. http://www.alternet.org/education/blame-campus-liberals-campaign-targets-yale
At the end of the day, Mr. Christakis’ much acclaimed book has nothing to do with the Yale College Class of 1969.
Mr. Willis is apparently a scholar on the subject of the 2015 controversy and has chosen to use that pretext to introduce it onto the class website. Unfortunately, the ubiquitous Mr. Sleeper has seized upon the opportunity to present his version of the truth. Laudably, both men consider the affair a stain on Yale’s reputation. Let’s let it go at that and let Blueprint stand on its own.
(BTW: note the irony in the book’s subtitle)
I have it on good authority that Sleeper does not “seize” any opportunity to present his views, but he does offer positive, constructive views of a Yale education, as in his most recent Salon column, of just a few days ago. I think that we’ll all endorse this take on the college, not least because the column has been picked up featured by the conservative website RealClearPolicy:
https://www.realclearpolicy.com/2019/04/23/social_and_political_change_built_on_reading_41536.html
I still haven’t read Nicholas Christakis’ new book, but I thank Wayne for the review, and I’ll read it before the reunion. On the events of 2015, it’s really important to remember that the video of a couple of screaming students in a group of 30, many of whom looked quite uncomfortable with the screaming, had little to do with what a thousand other students were doing at that same time and during that same week. I’ve tried to describe what was going on, but, lamentably for liberal education, a picture is sometimes worth more than a thousand words in ways that get the story wrong — as Erik Christakis herself made explicitly clear in a TIME magazine column she wrote years earlier about another video.
If in fact Messrs. Willis and Sleeper have differing views of the 2015 Christakis affair, then let me propose that they debate each other on the website. That would be an appropriate use.
Ha! I recognize this move from a book I read, with delight, at Yale: Eric Berne’s Games People Play. See the chapter on “Let’s You and Him Fight” for details!
Scott, I do agree with your suggestion though, that we agree that the event was a stain on Yale’s history and let Blueprint stand on its own. And yes, Christakis doesn’t have any direct connection to ’69. I think this “free speech on campus” debate is still an open one, and I was disappointed that we couldn’t get him to host a panel discussion at the Reunion on the subject. Perhaps Salovey will address it during Saturday afternoon’s event.
After listening to the audiobook once (while gardening), I was inclined to add it to the list of books I’d recommend as essential to understanding the world and evaluating what you read in the newspapers. After listening a second time (gardening again), I definitely added it to the list. Somehow it worked its way into half the dinner table conversations I had with visiting relatives last week. The audiobook is read by the author so you get it with all the nuances that a human voice can carry.
I just listened to Christakis in dialogue with Sam Harris … he makes a great case for the evolutionary value of our sociology and capacities for cooperation and self-sacrifice if necessary. Really interesting. He also takes on some hot topics, e.g,, gender differences. Not shy, either of them!