#156 — The Evolution of Culture
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
166.37646
Summary
In this episode of the Making Sense Podcast, host Sam Harris sits down with his wife, Annika Harris, to discuss her new book, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind, which is available for pre-order now on Amazon and elsewhere. They talk about what it's like to be a neuroscientist and a writer, and what it means to have a book written about consciousness and the mind, and why it's so important that we should all read it. Sam also talks about his Town Hall Event for subscribers, which was a bit of a mess, but that's not a bad thing. And he talks about what he's been up to in the past week, and the new book he's writing about it, and how it's going to change the way we think about consciousness. Sam Harris is a writer and professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Conscious and The New York Times Bestseller, Rise of the Rocket Girls. He's also the author of several other books, including Conscious, a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind and The Other Other, which will be published next month. Sam is also the host of the podcast Making Sense, a podcast on consciousness and consciousness, and hosts a podcast called The Other Blur, which you should check out if you haven t heard of it. . We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our listeners, so you don't have to become a supporter of the show. We don t run ads. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a supporter! Become a supporter by becoming a patron of the making sense podcast by becoming one of us, becoming a member of our patron, and you'll get access to all sorts of great shows, including The Making Sense and other perks, including the latest releases, like the latest podcasts, the latest ones we're making available on Audible, the best ones on the web, and all kinds of cool things we're listening to on the airwaves, and we'll hear more of Sam's work, too, too much more of his work, and more. You'll get a discount code: MAKING MESING MADE MADE SENSE, and a chance to win a discount on future episodes, and so much more! Subscribe to the podcast!
Transcript
00:00:10.880
Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
00:00:14.680
feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
00:00:18.420
In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at
00:00:24.060
There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with
00:00:30.620
We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
00:00:35.800
So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
00:00:53.880
First, I just had my town hall event for subscribers.
00:01:00.900
Unfortunately, I had a migraine for it, which was a bit of bad luck.
00:01:04.840
But other than that, I'm happy to say that I think we nailed the look of the thing.
00:01:10.280
The whole thing was staged and directed by Stephen Brill.
00:01:13.880
And I think it really is the best-looking livestream I've ever seen.
00:01:25.260
But we will definitely run this experiment again, because I think it looks promising.
00:01:29.780
And I will let you all know when that will happen.
00:01:32.200
Many thanks to Stephen and his team for doing a more professional job than I could have imagined
00:01:39.060
And many thanks to my friend Eric Weinstein for joining me on stage.
00:01:45.580
I was just on Kara Swisher's podcast, Recode, which is produced by Vox Media.
00:01:55.360
As you might recall, Kara and I collided on Twitter a little bit.
00:02:00.100
And then we wound up doing a podcast to explore and process our differences.
00:02:10.020
In her world, it seems to have been quite controversial.
00:02:13.220
She was immediately deluged with criticism for having platformed me.
00:02:18.240
Many of her fans just began shrieking their unwillingness to even listen to our conversation.
00:02:24.260
All I can say is the response demonstrated the truth of my claim that the kinds of smears
00:02:33.740
At one point, I told Kara that the effect of Ezra Klein's articles in Vox about my conversation
00:02:41.180
with Charles Murray were to paint me as a racist.
00:02:45.840
But when you look at the response of the Vox Recode audience, you need no further evidence
00:02:52.560
And much of her audience responded as though she hit Richard Spencer on the podcast.
00:03:01.280
And I must say, I'm happy to be spending much less time even looking at social media.
00:03:05.880
Thank you, Kara, for being willing to have a conversation.
00:03:10.900
And hopefully the smart subset of your audience will understand what happened there.
00:03:16.000
I'm very happy to say that my wife, Annika, has her first book for grown-ups coming out.
00:03:21.460
It is called Conscious, A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind.
00:03:29.480
June 4th is the pub date, but it is available for pre-order now on Amazon and elsewhere.
00:03:36.260
And I won't flog it too hard here, but it really is a beautiful analysis of what is so fascinating
00:03:45.580
And I must say, she has better endorsements on this book than I have ever gotten for any
00:03:55.620
In this gem of a book, Annika Harris tackles consciousness controversies with incisive rigor
00:04:08.380
and clarity, in a style that's accessible and captivating, yet never dumbed down.
00:04:14.120
Adam Frank, the astrophysicist, says a remarkably focused, concise, and provocative overview of
00:04:24.580
I have read many, many great books on consciousness in my life as a neuroscientist.
00:04:31.380
It deals with unsolved questions and dizzying concepts with a graciousness and clarity that
00:04:37.300
Anyway, she has many other blurbs here, from Sean Carroll and Gavin DeBecker, Natalia Holt,
00:04:48.720
Maybe I'll just read the one from Natalia Holt here, to close out.
00:04:51.900
Natalia wrote the New York Times bestseller, Rise of the Rocket Girls.
00:04:55.600
Harris holds a mirror up to ourselves, and the reflection she casts is wondrously unfamiliar.
00:05:00.900
In salient prose that intertwine science and philosophy, Harris turns her joyful curiosity
00:05:07.540
Every sentence of this book works upon the next, delving the reader deeper into an exploration
00:05:13.240
While most books that contemplate the mysteries of the universe make one feel small in comparison,
00:05:17.940
conscious gives the reader an undeniable sense of presence.
00:05:22.000
Anyway, I'm very proud of her, as perhaps you can tell, and I'm looking forward to seeing
00:05:31.140
The WakingUp app, we are still adding new content and new features, and we are now reaching
00:05:39.100
out to businesses, so enterprise partnerships are now available.
00:05:43.360
If you're interested in exploring that, please send an email to enterprise at wakingup.com.
00:05:49.800
And please keep the reviews coming in the App Store.
00:05:54.080
And send all bug reports to support at wakingup.com.
00:06:02.180
The best way for us to fix that quickly is to hear from you all.
00:06:13.760
Nicholas has been on the podcast before, but that was before he had his new book,
00:06:19.020
Blueprint, The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.
00:06:21.920
This is a scientific look at all that is right with us as social primates and creators of
00:06:31.680
We get into much of it here, though we digress.
00:06:41.560
Nicholas Christakis is a physician and sociologist who explores the ancient origins and modern implications
00:06:48.700
He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University.
00:06:51.300
Where he's the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science in the Departments of Sociology,
00:06:56.500
Medicine, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistics and Data Science, and Biomedical Engineering.
00:07:03.140
He is the coordinator of the Yale Institute of Network Science and the co-author of Connected.
00:07:18.840
Nicholas, thanks for coming back on the podcast.
00:07:23.020
So as you are a returning champion, I don't need to introduce you at especially great length.
00:07:29.820
You know, last time we spoke about your adventures in the quad at Yale, which was the controversy
00:07:37.020
that brought you into prominence outside of science on culture war issues.
00:07:43.800
We're going to talk a lot about culture, and so I'm sure we'll wind up stumbling onto these
00:07:49.900
But I'll just remind people that you were the long-suffering professor standing in the quad
00:07:59.860
And you're, if I recall, not so keen to dredge much out of that episode.
00:08:06.400
But the reason for our discussion today is you've written a fascinating book titled Blueprint,
00:08:14.700
which is a, I mean, I'll let you introduce your purpose in writing this book, but it's
00:08:19.920
really interesting social science that we'll be talking about.
00:08:23.760
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of ironic to me a little bit.
00:08:27.740
I knew when the book was published and that I, you know, would be speaking about it, that
00:08:33.340
it would be unavoidable that questions would come up or people would mention the experience
00:08:41.140
And I was really dreading it because it's something I want to leave behind me.
00:08:46.020
I had this very good fortune of Frank Rooney interviewing me, and he very kindly sort of framed
00:08:55.260
And I think that allowed me to really put it behind me.
00:09:00.540
I mean, I told him that this was not even one of the 10 worst things that's, it was in
00:09:05.140
the, it was in the 10 worst things that's happened to me in my life, but not the worst
00:09:09.220
And, you know, we did our best in challenging circumstances and are happy to leave it behind
00:09:18.680
One is that I had begun this book about 10 years ago.
00:09:21.900
And if anything, the events of that year delayed me my completing the book by a year or two,
00:09:27.380
but actually increased my interest in writing it because of a number of reasons.
00:09:31.900
First of all, I am committed to the claim that human beings are fundamentally good.
00:09:39.120
But also because in the, in the courtyard that day, some of the things that I had studied for
00:09:43.880
so long and had been thinking about for so long were so manifest, for instance, the way
00:09:50.060
in which people can de-individuate, which is a quality we have evolved for good reasons.
00:09:57.100
That is to say, to suspend our own personal interests in order to advance the interests
00:10:01.960
of a group, to lose our sense of personal identity and, and sort of fuse with a group.
00:10:06.720
But when carried to an extreme, you get things like mobs and, you know, witch trials and all
00:10:12.920
kinds of other horrors. And, and the challenge in that type of a circumstance is to cultivate
00:10:19.620
in, or you, you know, you get the kind of us versus them mentality that Brooke Snow
00:10:25.120
shared understanding. And the challenge in that type of a circumstance is to get people to
00:10:29.520
see themselves as individuals, not as members of a group. And I, I remember in the
00:10:36.700
courtyard that day as I watched the students de-individuate and, and suspend their own
00:10:42.480
identity. And I remember thinking to myself, I have to get them to see me as a person and
00:10:48.020
I have to get them to see that I see them as individuals, not as members of some class
00:10:53.980
of people. And that's why I started asking them to introduce themselves. I said, hi, I'm
00:10:59.300
Nicholas, you know, what's your name? And that was rather, rather deliberate actually
00:11:04.120
on my part. I think it's good manners, but it was also rather deliberate. Anyway, so
00:11:08.800
there's some connection, but not a great one between those events and the ideas in the book.
00:11:14.460
Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot in the sense that you just flagged one where, you know, so
00:11:19.540
much that is good about us, or at least has been necessary to our success in the past is
00:11:26.140
also bad about us in, in a modern context, at least potentially so. So, you know, it's pretty
00:11:32.180
hard to see how in most circumstances de-individuating is a desirable psychological trait, except, you
00:11:42.200
know, as you point out, it's immensely energizing and canceling of friction. It's a great aid to
00:11:51.500
cooperation. I mean, what, you know, a mob, if nothing else, is cooperating toward a common
00:11:57.540
purpose. And, you know, so much of the fragmentation of our society, I mean, one could
00:12:03.720
attribute it to some degree to both capacities we have. We have a kind of radical individualism
00:12:10.600
where everyone seems to feel that they need an opinion on everything. Everyone is an expert,
00:12:16.420
at least potentially so. And this is being amplified by social media, but then it's giving
00:12:21.880
us these cascades of mob-like behavior, which is, you know, I would argue not just staying
00:12:31.920
on social media, but surging out into the real world. When I saw what you were experiencing
00:12:37.660
at Yale and what I've seen on other campuses and in the tech community in particular, it's
00:12:43.420
this kind of moral panic is not just staying on campuses. It does seem like an expression,
00:12:50.160
or at least it seems plausible to suspect that this is a real world expression of a phenomenon
00:12:58.460
that's mostly happening on social media. At least it's being energized by what's happening
00:13:02.760
on social media. It's just where are people getting their information and their attitudes
00:13:08.120
and their convictions that, you know, in this case, in the local circumstance you experienced,
00:13:14.860
that Yale is a theater of intolerable oppression.
00:13:19.260
Right. Well, okay. So you've identified like five different topics as far as I'm concerned.
00:13:26.200
Well, one of them has to do with a kind of spread of disbelief, not disbelief, the spread
00:13:31.780
of false beliefs and why people will willingly believe things which are false. Now, I know
00:13:37.800
you've thought a lot about this and talked a lot about it, and that itself is an interesting
00:13:42.380
topic. And actually, paradoxically, the willing embrace of something manifestly false is precisely
00:13:48.820
often how one demonstrates belonging in a group. Right. So the, you know, the belief that, you know,
00:13:56.160
that in religious beliefs, many religious beliefs have this character where you're called upon to
00:14:01.180
believe things which clearly are not true. And that's a signal that you are a member of this group
00:14:07.800
and that you have a certain kind of faith, for instance. But you also highlighted a number of
00:14:12.060
other features, one of which I'd like to go back to.
00:14:19.860
Yeah, yeah. But I really, I want to flag that point because that's such a good one. And I notice
00:14:25.100
it in other contexts. I mean, so much of the support for Trump that I find impossible to get my mind
00:14:31.640
around in that, you know, people will apparently believe the unbelievable or accept the obvious
00:14:38.840
contempt for truth that comes at great cost. It is a kind of loyalty test. It really is just,
00:14:45.280
it is an in-group signal, which if you're not in the group seems totally perverse.
00:14:51.840
Yes. I think that's all right. And I also think there's another thread, we can come to that. And
00:14:57.000
there's another thread that relates to the way in which, you know, the book, the subtitle of the book
00:15:01.900
is The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. There's a way in which natural selection has shaped
00:15:07.200
our social interaction style, for example, the structure of our social networks, which I talk
00:15:12.680
about, so as to optimize the flow of useful information. So if you think about it, in the
00:15:21.660
extreme case, you might have a case in which nobody interacts with anybody. That's called a null set in
00:15:27.560
a network. There are no connections. There's no spread of information there. And the other extreme,
00:15:32.440
you have a fully saturated graph, a set in which everyone is connected to everyone else.
00:15:37.660
That's also not efficient. You have too much inputs. So in between, there are myriad possible,
00:15:43.920
you know, extraordinarily large number of possible arrangements of social networks.
00:15:48.200
And it's not a coincidence that natural selection has shaped our pattern of friendship formation
00:15:54.720
in a fashion that, for instance, optimizes our ability to work together and communicate useful
00:16:02.420
and reliable information, which ultimately I would argue is our capacity for culture, which in turn is
00:16:09.020
ultimately our source of wealth, health, and our ability to manifest a kind of social conquest of
00:16:17.000
the earth, as E.O. Wilson says. What makes us such a successful species, able to occupy niches
00:16:22.560
everywhere on the planet, is not our bodies, but our minds, which give us the capacity for culture
00:16:28.600
and give us the capacity to, you know, find water in the desert and invent kayaks in the Arctic.
00:16:34.540
So anyway, that's another topic. But what I'd like to go back, if I might, is to your original
00:16:38.860
question about groupiness and de-individuation. First of all, de-individuation is very valuable if you
00:16:44.140
need a group to take risks, for example, to engage in defense against attacks by other groups.
00:16:49.120
You don't want everybody afraid for their own life, unable or unwilling to band together to mount a
00:16:54.400
defense or to work together to bring down a mastodon, some large game animal. You need some
00:17:00.500
kind of sense of commitment to the group. And it's very clearly the case that natural selection has
00:17:10.160
shaped us to be able to cooperate with others, and in particular in our species with genetically
00:17:17.180
unrelated individuals. This is one of the key ways in which we differ, for example, from ants and
00:17:22.760
termites and wasps and other youth social insects, is that we're not clones. We're each different.
00:17:28.840
And it's amazing that we have this capacity for friendship with unrelated individuals, which we'll
00:17:33.980
also come back to. But having said all that very quickly, I'd like to go back to the groupiness.
00:17:38.860
And so here's the thing. Imagine you have a large population. Let's put it in modern terms.
00:17:43.780
Imagine you have the United States. You have Americans. And underneath that large category,
00:17:48.160
you have groups, which could be defined by religion or language or ethnicity or immigrant status or
00:17:54.020
sexuality or whatever, occupation. And then below that, you have individuals, the constituent individuals
00:18:01.700
which make up a society. If we are struggling with tribalism, which we are around the world today,
00:18:09.460
and which, incidentally, we always have has been a challenge. So in the middle level, you have these
00:18:13.860
groups which draw very bright distinctions between us and them. And they grant us a great amount of charity
00:18:19.540
and them, you know, are seen as the enemy. We political parties too, by the way. The reason we have this type
00:18:28.680
of us versus them mentality and this desire to form these groups, one of the reasons is to reduce the scale.
00:18:35.820
In other words, in order to cooperate, as I mentioned a bit earlier with that example of the
00:18:40.240
networks, in order to cooperate, it's too challenging to have to cooperate with everybody.
00:18:46.040
So natural selection has equipped us with the capacity to make these distinctions between us and
00:18:50.840
them, in part, many believe, and I agree, to make it possible for us to cooperate. In other words,
00:18:57.800
there's a kind of co-evolution, this kind of xenophobia or parochialism or tribalism
00:19:02.820
has co-evolved with our capacity for altruism and kindness and cooperation. So this very thing
00:19:10.400
which gives us trouble is also one of the very things which makes it possible for us to be nice
00:19:15.320
to each other. Because otherwise, the challenge would be nice to everybody, which isn't an easy
00:19:21.420
Well, didn't Samuel Bowles do that game theoretic work?
00:19:24.460
Yeah, Sam Bowles, exactly, and Sergei Gabriolets, and Robert Axelrod, and many people have done
00:19:32.460
work like that. So in the middle, so one of the tools we have to foster cooperation
00:19:37.700
is to, because of the challenge of scale, is to have this type of groupiness. Incidentally,
00:19:43.100
this serves other purposes. But for present purposes, going back to our thing, we've got America,
00:19:47.320
we've got groups, we've got individuals. One way to tackle tribalism is to take advantage of some of
00:19:54.900
our evolutionary machinery and step up a level to the level of the whole country and use our capacity
00:20:03.920
to define groups and define the group more broadly. Like we are all Americans. And this has always been
00:20:10.100
part of our history. It's in fact, part of the American ideal, part of the American project.
00:20:13.600
Anyone can be an American. We are one of the few nations, the American project is one of the few
00:20:17.760
nations where you just arrive on our shores, you commit to the Bill of Rights and certain liberal
00:20:23.440
principles, and you can become an American. It's not defined along ethnic or religious or any such
00:20:30.440
ground. So we've not always adhered to these ideals, obviously. But nevertheless, the ideal is that
00:20:35.960
anyone can become an American, a pluribus unum. And so we could step up a level from groups,
00:20:44.960
use our capacity to define us versus them, broaden the definition and say we're all Americans.
00:20:50.620
And this, in my view, is one strategy we could literally cognitively employ to break down some of
00:20:58.000
these tribal barriers. But there's another strategy that's less obvious and that's equally important
00:21:02.360
and equally a part of our tradition. And that's to step down a level, to the level of individuals.
00:21:08.640
And here's an interesting thing. We humans have evolved the capacity for individual identity.
00:21:16.680
And this is actually really odd. It's an odd paradox that in order to live socially,
00:21:22.660
we first have to be individuals. And what do I mean by that? Well, we communicate our individual
00:21:28.380
identity with our faces. Every human face is different than every other human face.
00:21:33.080
And it turns out that this capacity to have individual faces is unusual in the animal kingdom.
00:21:41.420
And not only that, but you can look at a sea of 1,000 or 10,000 faces and you can tell the difference
00:21:46.200
between every other face. And this cognitive machinery you have in your brain is also a luxury.
00:21:52.640
These are evolutionary luxuries. The capacity to signal and detect individual identity are
00:21:59.540
evolutionary luxuries, which our species and a few others manifest. And in fact, they are necessary
00:22:06.180
to live socially because you have to be able to tell, you know, this is my child, not someone else's
00:22:11.680
child that I should raise. Or this is a friend and not an enemy. Or this is a person who cooperated with
00:22:18.600
me or did not cooperate with me. So in order to live with each other, we have to be able to
00:22:24.760
detect the individual identity of each person. And natural selection has given us this capacity.
00:22:30.880
Incidentally, as a tangent on a tangent, this capacity is also connected to our ability to
00:22:35.720
experience grief, which is another whole topic. Anyway.
00:22:40.160
I'd like to not lose sight of that footnote, but I can say that as someone who is regularly mistaken
00:22:44.560
for Ben Stiller, our capacity to recognize individual faces is not what it might be.
00:22:49.040
Yes. It's true. And I can tell you, like, I am, I have my own limitations in this regard,
00:22:55.720
specifically with respect to people's names, although I'm pretty good with faces. I can
00:22:59.000
tell if I've seen you. I wouldn't mistake you for Ben Stiller, Sam.
00:23:01.940
I don't know if that's a compliment or not, but I'll take it.
00:23:03.980
Yes, that is. So, but anyway, so, so finishing up this point, this part of the point, I mean,
00:23:09.640
that's why I love talking to you. It's like we could go in 10 different directions,
00:23:12.080
but I'm just finishing up this part of the point. So, so this capacity to, to, to see each other
00:23:18.680
as individuals also provides a kind of liberation for the dehumanization of tribalism. We can step
00:23:25.520
down a level. And this has been a part of our tradition too. In fact, this is what Martin Luther
00:23:30.040
King was arguing when he said, you know, he looks forward to a time when people are judged by the
00:23:34.980
content of their character rather than the color of their skin. He's saying we should treat each other
00:23:39.120
as individuals and he's totally right. And this also effaces tribalism. So, so tribalism,
00:23:45.680
groupiness, which is a problem in our society today is a part of our nature. It's depressing,
00:23:50.260
at least to me, his preference of us versus them exists for a number of reasons, but we have other
00:23:57.220
tools at our disposal that evolution has equipped us with to cooperate as a, as a collective and avoid
00:24:06.040
some of the downsides of tribalism. Well, that's a fascinating analysis. Actually, I detected in
00:24:11.380
there a point of contact between the two levels that I had never really thought about before, but
00:24:16.540
you were describing a way of escaping tribalism by going up a level and acknowledging that anyone who
00:24:26.120
essentially can come in and share our values is part of our group. So this, this effaces racism and,
00:24:33.600
and, and xenophobia and religious bigotry, and at least potentially everything accidental about a
00:24:41.340
person that could keep him out of our group or keep him or her as them can be erased, provided
00:24:51.200
that person buy into certain ideas and certain ethical norms, presumably. But one of those core ideas,
00:25:01.780
one of those norms, one of those political values that we're anchored to is the primacy of the
00:25:09.240
individual, at least for most intents and purposes. I mean, so, so that, you know, individual freedom,
00:25:15.520
freedom of speech, freedom of belief, the freedom to be uncoerced and unmolested by one's neighbors,
00:25:24.640
provided what you're doing isn't bringing harm to anyone else. It kind of, you know, classically
00:25:29.720
liberal picture of the political landscape. That is one of the core values that so many of us share.
00:25:36.620
It does seem like those two algorithms for escaping tribalism coincide, at least on, on that point.
00:25:45.380
Well, first of all, I mean, I think you, you are highlighting, I mean, just to say that the things
00:25:50.240
that you, the things that, um, the, the qualities that define the larger group need not be political
00:25:57.520
qualities. I mean, the example you just gave about, and that we were talking about America,
00:26:01.360
you could in principle, broaden the group, for example, when the Hutus and the Tutsis were
00:26:05.860
slaughtering each other, they could have brought the group to say, you know, we are Africans, for
00:26:10.060
example, or we are, uh, you know, some other, you know, we're descendants of this original settlers
00:26:14.600
or whatever. I mean, you could, or, or if you have, uh, you have the Shiites and the, and the Sunnis
00:26:20.120
that are killing each other, they could say, well, wait a minute, we're both Muslim, for example.
00:26:24.120
You know, so it doesn't have to be a political affiliation. I was just using our country as
00:26:29.100
an example, but you're right to highlight that in our particular case, one of those founding
00:26:34.160
beliefs that defines this higher order group is paradoxically a kind of commitment to individual,
00:26:40.520
you know, the rights of individuals. And you're also then, I think, alluding to, you know, the
00:26:45.260
well-understood challenge of, you know, poppers, the open society and its enemies, you know, this,
00:26:50.120
this notion that there is a sense in which our tolerance could actually be, uh, in our openness
00:26:57.100
could actually be our undoing. So, which is a whole other topic and a whole other thing to,
00:27:08.600
Yeah, exactly. We had left a number of footnotes behind though.
00:27:12.680
I don't want to lose the point you were making about grief. And then, uh, then I want to back all
00:27:17.420
the way up and go more systematically through your thesis, but what were you saying about grief and,
00:27:22.600
and individual grief? I mean, grief is, so here's the thing about grief. And I talk about grief in
00:27:28.140
the book. I mean, I was a hospice doctor for many years. I, um, took care of people who were dying.
00:27:33.620
I don't know, for 15 years, I was in Chicago and then at Harvard when I was, uh, on the faculty there
00:27:38.840
and, uh, had my own personal experience with grief. My, my mother was terminally ill when I was a child.
00:27:43.980
She was diagnosed when I was six and she died when I was 25 and she was just 47 when she died.
00:27:50.820
And so, you know, I grew up with this. I, and any, many, I would suspect if I had to guess,
00:27:56.700
maybe half your audience or a third of your audience would have had personal experience
00:27:59.800
with grief, had someone they know died. This is less common in the modern world than it used to be
00:28:04.280
where often children would die. So people would have siblings or, or offspring that had died or,
00:28:10.060
but anyway, anyone who's had the experience of grief knows that it's this extraordinary
00:28:15.220
particular kind of pain. It can be a physical pain. You know, your, your, your jaw hurts from
00:28:22.740
clenching and crying and your, your chest hurts and, and emotionally it's just agony. And then you
00:28:28.600
have all these other cognitive processes. You, you see the dead person in a crowd. I mean, I've had
00:28:34.560
this experience and you know, they're, they're dead, but your heart wishes they were alive. And it's,
00:28:40.160
it's, it's, you know, novels have been written about it. I mean, it's, it's an incredibly profound
00:28:44.620
human experience, this experience of grief. But the thing about grief is that it's unlike any other
00:28:49.760
emotion. It's not sadness, right? It's something different. Like your sadness, I think is very
00:28:55.640
similar to my sadness, but your grief is rather different than my grief because it's connected to
00:29:00.900
the death of a particular person. You grieve not when a stranger dies, you grieve when a very
00:29:06.460
particular individual close to you dies. So, so grief is connected to our individuality. But one
00:29:13.780
of the ironies is that we're not the only animals to feel grief and other, certain other animals do.
00:29:20.680
Now, these are particular animals. These are other social mammals that have evolved to live like we do.
00:29:26.420
And, and, and I discuss those in the book. This includes, for example, elephants and whales,
00:29:31.720
certain whale species, certain primate species. And there's one, there's a deep irony here,
00:29:36.180
which I'll come back to the grief thing in a moment, that actually by examining the ways in
00:29:41.080
which our social lives are similar to these other animals, we can better understand how we are similar
00:29:46.320
to each other. In other words, the more like, the more our friendships resemble the friendships of
00:29:51.020
elephants, the more our friendships are the same the world over. And we can, we can better understand
00:29:56.900
the fact that friendship is a human universal, or grief is a human universal, or the capacity to
00:30:03.820
recognize individuals is a human universal, when we find analogous qualities to those in animal species
00:30:11.940
like elephants. So the last common ancestor we had with elephants was about 85 million years ago.
00:30:17.260
It was a small shrew-like mammal, as far as we know, it did not live socially. And here are these elephants
00:30:22.780
over 85 million years, they evolve a way of living socially by convergent evolution that's very, very similar
00:30:30.660
to our own. They have friendships like we do, for example, and they grieve, many of the most expert
00:30:37.960
ethologists of elephants believe, like we do, or similar to we do. So, so anyway, so grief is a, is a very
00:30:44.700
interesting itself phenomenon. And it's, it's, I think it reflects our individuality and it's part of
00:30:49.580
our sociality as well. So yeah, let's talk about the biological underpinnings of all of this, or the,
00:30:57.580
the evolutionary underpinnings. So you referred to the social suite, what is the social suite?
00:31:03.340
Well, I'd like to back up even from that, just one step and say, you know, I think there's been a lot
00:31:09.100
of attention in the sciences and in the public sphere to the way in which humans have evolved to,
00:31:16.060
you know, be inveterately bad, you know, our propensity for violence and selfishness and,
00:31:21.960
and mendacity. And yeah, we always started with tribalism.
00:31:26.000
Yeah. I mean, all of these qualities, but equally we have been shaped for good. We've been shaped to
00:31:31.920
love, to have a capacity for love and friendship and cooperation and, and teaching and many other
00:31:39.400
fine qualities. And, and I think these wonderful qualities have, you know, these, this bright side
00:31:44.660
has been denied the attention that it deserves. And so, and, and moreover, I would argue this bright
00:31:50.500
side is even more important. Keep in mind, I'm talking about the sweep of our evolution. So
00:31:54.240
tens and hundreds of thousands of years, we, we can also talk distinctly about the sweep of our
00:31:58.900
history, which is, you know, let's say over the last 10,000 years, but, but these larger forces
00:32:04.680
shaped us for many, many years. They're, they're, they're deeper, I would argue, and more profound
00:32:10.280
and certainly more ancient than the historical forces acting upon us today. And these forces shaped
00:32:15.880
us for good because if whenever I came near you, you killed me or you filled me with lies, you know,
00:32:22.240
you gave me useless or false information, or you were otherwise mean to me or, or, or, or violent
00:32:27.780
towards me, I would be better off living as a solitary animal. So, so the benefits of a connected
00:32:34.000
life must have outweighed the costs and, and natural selection has acted on our ways of living
00:32:40.640
socially as surely as it is it acted on our bodies and on our psychology. So, so, so one of the macro
00:32:47.340
arguments of the book is that the, that our genes and natural selection have shaped not just the
00:32:52.140
structure and function of our bodies, not just the structure and function of our minds, but also the
00:32:57.760
structure and function of our societies. And it has primarily equipped us with unbalanced good
00:33:03.020
qualities. And, and the, and the, there are eight that I highlight in the book, eight qualities that,
00:33:08.620
that we are eight features of this suite of qualities that make it possible for us to live
00:33:14.560
together. And these are, first of all, the capacity to love and record, I'm sorry, to have
00:33:19.500
and recognize individual identity. So this capacity to be individuals and recognize individuals,
00:33:25.740
a love for partners and offspring. We're very unusual as a species in that we don't just mate with each
00:33:31.300
other. We form a sustained and actually sentimental attachment. We love the people we have sex with.
00:33:38.180
We don't always do, but we can, and typically do. Friendship is a third important quality. We form
00:33:46.960
long-term non-reproductive unions with other members of our species. We're not the only animal
00:33:53.000
that does it, but it's rare. And the other animals we already talked about one, elephants, and there's
00:33:56.860
a couple of others, a few others. Social networks, we form social networks. Cooperation, a preference for
00:34:04.320
one's own group or in-group bias that we talked about earlier, a kind of mild hierarchy or relative
00:34:10.300
egalitarianism. So we are an animal that neither is totally egalitarian nor too authoritarian or too
00:34:19.800
hierarchical. We don't function well when we have no leaders, and we also don't like it when we have
00:34:26.840
autocratic leaders, people who can impose too much punishment from above. And finally, we've evolved
00:34:32.700
this capacity for social learning and teaching, which is also rare in the animal kingdom and is
00:34:38.280
astonishing. So many animals can learn, you know, little fish in the sea can learn that if it swims
00:34:45.560
towards the light, it finds food there. We don't just learn that way. We also learn by imitation or
00:34:52.460
socially. So, and this is very efficient. You know, I can put my hand in the fire and I learn that it's hot
00:34:58.760
and I pull my hand out. I have acquired some knowledge, but I paid a big price. Or I could
00:35:04.040
watch you put your hand in the fire and I gain almost as much knowledge, but I paid none of the
00:35:08.940
price. That's very efficient. Or you could teach me not to put my hand in the fire. And so we don't
00:35:16.580
just learn individually. We don't just learn socially, but we actually set out to teach each other stuff.
00:35:21.120
This is very rare in the animal kingdom, but we do it. So these are all of these qualities,
00:35:26.020
all of these fundamental aspects of our human nature, you will notice pertain to how we interact
00:35:31.120
with each other. So there's a whole other class of things, for example, our musicality, for instance,
00:35:37.340
or our risk aversion or other kinds of, or our, you know, visual cognition, for example,
00:35:45.080
all of which are other parts of human nature, but those can be experienced by isolated individuals,
00:35:51.400
you know, by a hermit in the mountains can have a religious experience, for example. But I'm
00:35:56.540
interested in the parts that require the presence of another person in order to reach their fruition.
00:36:02.380
And so that's what I call the social suite. It's a suite of eight qualities that natural selection
00:36:07.820
has shaped and that equip us to live together as a social species.
00:36:14.180
Right, right. Does that phrase social suite originate with you?
00:36:19.660
Nice. Well, it's a very useful grouping. And I would point out that these things are not,
00:36:26.760
in principle, entirely isolated from one another. I mean, they interpenetrate each other. So when
00:36:32.240
you were discussing hierarchy there, in the book, you differentiate at least two different types
00:36:39.080
of hierarchy. There are dominance hierarchies and there are hierarchies based on prestige.
00:36:44.260
And those function differently. I mean, they're both important, or at least have been important to
00:36:49.940
us as social primates. But prestige matters more and more, one could argue, the more civilized we
00:36:58.080
become. And prestige is the kind of thing that relates to some of these other capacities, like the
00:37:07.240
So there's a lot going on there among those eight characteristics.
00:37:12.080
Yeah. I mean, so you're absolutely right. They're all interrelated in very complex and interesting
00:37:17.460
ways. But just on the prestige thing, so just a dominance hierarchy has to do with the kind of
00:37:23.180
costs that superiors can impose on their subordinates. And a prestige hierarchy has, that relates to the kind
00:37:30.760
of benefits that a subordinate can extract or get from a superior. So, and you can think of these as
00:37:37.640
like, you know, a lot of, I mean, this is a bit of a simplification, but a dominance hierarchy often
00:37:42.320
impose, it relates to how physically, you know, I'm bigger than you and therefore I can punish you or
00:37:47.980
exclude you from mating opportunities, for example. And therefore in a dominance hierarchy, subordinates
00:37:53.400
avoid superordinates, but in a prestige hierarchy in which I can bestow benefits upon you, I can teach
00:38:01.260
you something useful, like how to light a fire or make a stone tool, for example. Now you don't avoid
00:38:07.160
me, you seek me out and I can attract, acquire power and attract followers as it were, not by virtue of
00:38:14.780
the costs I can impose on my subordinates, but by virtue of the benefits, which typically are cognitive
00:38:19.660
things I can teach them on my subordinates and that my subordinates can, and that a subordinate can get
00:38:25.280
from a subordinate. And in our species, we have evolved these parallel ways of having hierarchy,
00:38:31.260
which both of which are important. It can be important in different circumstances and at different
00:38:34.960
times, but the existence of this kind of prestige type of hierarchy connects, as you said, to this
00:38:40.740
teaching and learning function our species has, and also is connected therefore to our capacity for
00:38:45.920
culture. It's interesting not to keep bringing this back to Trump, which
00:38:49.600
which is a sin I have not committed very often. I really have not spoken about him for a very long
00:38:54.260
time, but I'm worried you're associating anything I say with him. No, no, but I think I'm getting
00:39:00.500
ready to read the Mueller report, so he's on my mind. But it just occurred to me that one of the things
00:39:06.840
I find so odious about him is that his status among those who purport to love him does seem to almost
00:39:17.700
entirely depend on the dominance side rather than the prestige side.
00:39:23.420
Yeah, the harm that he can impose on others is what some people find appealing.
00:39:30.260
This is perhaps especially true of the other Republican politicians who are supporting him,
00:39:34.700
despite the fact that he violates so many of their declared values. It's obvious that they're worried
00:39:41.680
about the political harm he can do to them based on his ability to drum up the base and their
00:39:48.740
comparative inability to do so. There's something just sickening about it.
00:39:51.820
That's right. I mean, I think that's, and you see this in different, you see this in politicians,
00:39:58.060
If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at
00:40:02.800
samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense
00:40:07.460
podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations
00:40:14.220
I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on
00:40:19.760
listener support, and you can subscribe now at samharris.org.