Making Sense with Sam Harris - #156 — The Evolution of Culture

Episode Date: May 13, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Nicholas Christakis about his new book, "Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society." If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. A little housekeeping here. First, I just had my town hall event for subscribers.

That was a very interesting experiment. Unfortunately, I had a migraine for it, which was a bit of bad luck. But other than that, I'm happy to say that I, which was a bit of bad luck. But other than that, I'm happy to say that I think we nailed the look of the thing. The whole thing was staged and directed by Stephen Brill, and I think it really is the best looking live stream I've ever seen. So the look has been achieved. Now I just need to tinker with the format. But we will definitely run this experiment again, because I think it looks promising. And I will let you all know when that will happen.

Many thanks to Stephen and his team for doing a more professional job than I could have imagined possible. And many thanks to my friend Eric Weinstein for joining me on stage. Let's see what else here. I was just on Kara Swisher's podcast, Recode, which is produced by Vox Media. That was fascinating. As you might recall, Kara and I collided on Twitter a little bit, and then we wound up doing a podcast to explore and process our differences. In my world, that was fine. In her world, it seems to have been quite controversial.

She was immediately deluged with criticism for having platformed me. Many of her fans just began shrieking their unwillingness to even listen to our conversation. All I can say is the response demonstrated the truth of my claim that the kinds of smears I've been complaining about actually work. At one point, I told Kara that the effect of Ezra Klein's articles in Vox about my conversation with Charles Murray were to paint me as a racist, and she seemed to doubt that. But when you look at the response of the Vox Recode audience, you need no further evidence on that point. Much of her audience responded as though she hit Richard Spencer on the podcast.

So it's quite insane out there, and I must say I'm happy to be spending much less time even looking at social media. Thank you, Kara, for being willing to have a conversation. I enjoyed hanging with you, and hopefully the smart subset of your audience will understand what happened there. I'm very happy to say that my wife Annika has her first book for grown-ups coming out. It is called Conscious, A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind, and it's coming out. It is called Conscious, a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind. And it's coming out early next month. June 4th is the pub date, but it is available for pre-order now on Amazon and elsewhere. And I won't flog it too hard here, but it really is a beautiful analysis of what is so fascinating about the mystery of consciousness. And I must say

she has better endorsements on this book than I have ever gotten for any of my books. I'll read you a couple here. Adam Grant says, Conscious offers the clearest, most compelling explanation I've ever seen of consciousness. Max Tegmark says, In this gem the astrophysicist, says, Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist, says, I have read many, many great books on consciousness in my life as a neuroscientist. Conscious tops them all, hands down. It deals with unsolved questions and dizzying concepts with a graciousness and clarity that leaves the reader deeply satisfied. Anyway, she has many other blurbs here from Sean Carroll and Gavin DeBecker, Natalia Holt, from Sean Carroll and Gavin DeBecker, Natalia Holt, Christoph Koch, Tim Urban. Maybe I'll just read the one from Natalia Holt here to close out. Natalia wrote the New York Times bestseller,

Rise of the Rocket Girls. Harris holds a mirror up to ourselves, and the reflection she casts is wondrously unfamiliar. In salient prose that intertwines science and philosophy, Harris turns her joyful curiosity on the nature of awareness. Every sentence of this book works upon the next, delving the reader deeper into an exploration of consciousness. While most books that contemplate the mysteries of the universe make one feel small in comparison, Conscious gives the reader an undeniable sense of presence.

Anyway, I am very proud of her, as perhaps you can tell, and I'm looking forward to seeing the book out in the world. What else here? The Waking Up app. We are still adding new content and new features, and we are now reaching out to businesses. So enterprise partnerships are now available. If you're interested in exploring that, please send an email to enterprise at wakingup.com. And please keep the reviews coming in the App Store. Those are extremely helpful. And send all bug reports to support at wakingup.com.

Occasionally an update will break something. The best way for us to fix that quickly is to hear from you all. So thank you for the continuing feedback. And now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Nicholas Christakis. Nicholas has been on the podcast before, but that was before he had his new book, Blueprint, The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. This is a scientific look at all that is right with us as social primates and creators of culture, and it's a fascinating story. We get into much of it here, though we digress. It's always great to speak with Nicholas. He has a wonderful laugh, as you'll hear. Nicholas Christakis is a physician and sociologist who explores the ancient origins

and modern implications of human nature. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, where he's the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science in the Departments of Sociology, Medicine, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistics and Data Science, and Biomedical Engineering. He is the coordinator of the Yale Institute of Network Science and the co-author of Connected. And now I bring you Nicholas Christakis. I am here with Nicholas Christakis. Nicholas, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Oh, Sam, thank you so much for having me. So as you are a returning champion, I don't need

to introduce you at especially great length. You know, last time we spoke about your adventures in the Quad at Yale, which was the controversy that brought you into prominence outside of science on culture war issues. We're going to talk a lot about culture, and so I'm sure we'll wind up stumbling onto these controversies from another angle. But I'll just remind people that you were the long-suffering professor standing in the quad at Yale being hectored by a mob of students. And you're, if I recall, not so keen to dredge much out of that episode. But the reason for our discussion today is you've written a fascinating book titled Blueprint, which is a...

I'll let you introduce your purpose in writing this book, but it's really interesting social science that we'll be talking about. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of ironic to me a little bit. I knew when the book was published and that I would be speaking about it, that it would be unavoidable that questions would come up or people would mention the experience I had at Yale in 2015. And I was really dreading it because it's something I want to leave behind me. I had this very good fortune of Frank Rooney interviewing me and he very kindly sort of framed

our experience, honestly. And I think that allowed me to really put it behind me. I mean, I told him that this was not even one of the 10 worst things that's, it was in the 10 worst things that's happened to me in my life, but not the worst thing. And if anything, the events of that year delayed me my completing the book by a year or two, but actually increased my interest in writing it because of a number of reasons. First of all, I am committed to the claim that human beings are fundamentally good. And I'm sure we'll be talking about that. But also, because in the courtyard that day, some of the things that I had studied for so long and had been thinking about for so long were so manifest. For instance, the way in which people can de-individuate, which is a quality we have evolved for good reasons, that is to say, to suspend our own personal interests in order to advance the interests of a group, to lose our

sense of personal identity and sort of fuse with a group. But when carried to an extreme, you get things like mobs and witch trials and all kinds of other horrors. And the challenge in that type of a circumstance is to cultivate in, or you get the kind of us versus them mentality that Brooke Snow shared understanding. And the challenge in that type of a circumstance is to get people to see themselves as individuals, not as members of a group. And I remember in the courtyard that day, as I watched the students de-individuate and, and suspend their own identity. And I remember thinking to myself, I have to get them to see me as a person

and I have to get them to see that I see them as individuals, not as members of some class of people. And that's why I started asking them to introduce themselves. I said, hi, I'm Nicholas. What's your name? And that was rather deliberate,

actually, on my part. I think it's good manners, but it was also rather deliberate. Anyway, so there's some connection, but not a great one between those events and the ideas in the book. Yeah, well, I think there's a lot in the sense that you just flagged one where so much that is good about us, or at least has been necessary to our success in the past, is also bad about us in a modern context, at least potentially so. So it's pretty hard to see how, in most circumstances, de-individuating is a desirable psychological trait, except, psychological trait, except, as you point out, it's immensely energizing and canceling of friction. It's a great aid to cooperation. A mob, if nothing else, is cooperating toward a common

purpose. And so much of the fragmentation of our society, one could attribute it to some degree to both capacities we have. We have a kind of radical individualism where everyone seems to feel that they need an opinion on everything. Everyone is an expert, at least potentially so, and this is being amplified by social media, but then it's giving us these cascades of mob-like behavior, which is, you know, I would argue, not just staying on social media, but surging out into the real world. When I saw what you were experiencing at Yale and what I've seen on other campuses and in the tech community in particular, this kind of moral panic is not just staying on campuses. It does seem like an expression, or at least it seems plausible to

suspect that this is a real-world expression of a phenomenon that's mostly happening on social media. At least it's being energized by what's happening on social media. It's just where are people getting their information and their attitudes and their convictions that, you know, in this case, in the local circumstance you experienced, that Yale is a theater of intolerable oppression? Right. Well, okay. So you've identified like five different topics as far as I'm concerned. Good luck with that. Yeah, thanks. One of them has to do with a kind of spread of disbelief, not disbelief, the spread of false beliefs and why people will willingly believe things which are false.

Now, I know you've thought a lot about this and talked a lot about it. And that itself is an interesting topic. And actually, paradoxicallyically the willing embrace of something manifestly false is precisely often how one demonstrates belonging in a group right so the the you know the belief that uh you know that um in religious beliefs many religious beliefs have this character where you're called upon to believe things which clearly are not true. And that's a signal that you are a member of this group and that you have a certain kind of faith, for instance. But you also highlighted a number of other features, one of which I'd like to go back to. Although I do want to now risk

diverting you. A diversion on a diversion, Sam. Yeah, yeah. But I really want to flag that point because that's such a good one. And I notice it in other contexts. I mean, so much of the support for Trump that I find impossible to get my mind around in that people will apparently believe the unbelievable or accept the obvious contempt for truth that comes at great cost. truth that comes at great cost, it is a kind of loyalty test. It really is just, it is an in-group signal, which if you're not in the group seems totally perverse. Yes, I think that's all right. And I also think there's another thread, we can come to that, and there's another thread that relates to the way in which, you know, the book, the subtitle of the book is The Evolutionary Origins of a good society. There's a way in which natural selection has shaped our social interaction style, for example, the structure of our social networks, which I talk about, so as to optimize the flow of useful information. So if you think about it in the extreme case, you might have a case in which

nobody interacts with anybody. That's called a null set in a network. There are no connections. There's no spread of information there. And in the other extreme, you have a fully saturated graph, a set in which everyone is connected to everyone else. That's also not efficient. You have too much inputs. So in between, there are myriad possible, you know, extraordinarily large number of possible

arrangements of social networks. And it's not a coincidence that natural selection has shaped our pattern of friendship formation in a fashion that, for instance, optimizes our ability to work together and communicate useful and reliable information, which ultimately, I would argue, is our capacity for culture, which in turn is ultimately our source of wealth, health, and our ability to manifest a kind of social conquest of the earth, as E.O. Wilson says. What makes us such a successful species, able to occupy niches everywhere on the planet is not our bodies, but our minds, which give us the capacity for culture and give us the capacity to find water in the desert and invent kayaks in the Arctic. So anyway, that's another topic. But what I'd like to go back,

if I might, is to your original question about groupiness and de-individuation. First of all, de-individuation is very valuable if you need a group to take risks. For example, to engage in defense against attacks by other groups, you don't want everybody afraid for their own life, unable or unwilling to band together to mount a defense or to work together to bring down a mastodon, some large game animal. You need some kind of sense of commitment to the group. And it's very clearly the case that natural selection has shaped us to be able to cooperate with others. And in particular, in our species with genetically unrelated individuals, this is one of the key ways in which we differ, for example, from ants and termites and wasps and other social insects,

is that we're not clones. We're each different. And it's amazing that we have this capacity for friendship with unrelated individuals, which we'll also come back to. But having said all that very quickly, I'd like to go back to the groupiness. And so here's the thing. Imagine you have a large population. Let's put it in modern terms. Imagine you have the United States, you have Americans. And underneath that large category, you have groups, which could be defined by religion or language or ethnicity or immigrant status or sexuality or whatever, occupation. And then below that, you have individuals, the constituent individuals, which make up a society. If we are struggling with tribalism, which we are around the world today, and which incidentally we always have has been a challenge.

So in the middle level, you have these groups which draw very bright distinctions between us and them. And they grant us a great amount of charity and them, you know, are seen as the enemy. We political parties too, by the way. them, you know, are seen as the enemy. We political parties too, by the way. The reason we have this type of us versus them mentality and this desire to form these groups, one of the reasons is to reduce the scale. In other words, in order to cooperate, as I mentioned a bit earlier with that example of the networks, in order to cooperate, it's too challenging to have to cooperate with everybody. So natural selection has equipped us with the capacity to make these distinctions between us

and them, in part, many believe, and I agree, to make it possible for us to cooperate. In other words, there's a kind of co-evolution, this kind of xenophobia or parochialism or tribalism has co-evolved with our capacity for altruism and kindness and cooperation. So this very thing which gives us trouble is also one of the very things which makes it possible for us to be nice to each other. Because otherwise the challenge would be nice to everybody, which isn't an easy thing to achieve. Well, didn't Samuel Bowles do that game theoretic work? Yeah, Sam Bowles, exactly. And Sergei Gavrilets and Robert Axelrod and many people have done work like that.

So in the middle, so one of the tools we have to foster cooperation is to, because of the challenge of scale, is to have this type of groupiness. Incidentally, this serves other purposes, but for present purposes, going back to our thing, we've got America, we've had groups, we've got individuals. One way to tackle tribalism is to take advantage of some of our evolutionary machinery and step up a level to the level of the whole country and use our capacity

to define groups and define the group more broadly. Like we are all Americans. And this has always been part of our history. It's in fact, part of the American ideal, part of the American project. Anyone can be an American. We are one of the few nations, the American project is one of the few nations where you just arrive on our shores, you commit to the Bill of Rights and certain liberal principles, and you can become an American. You know, it's not defined along ethnic or religious or any such ground. So we've not always adhered to these ideals, obviously. But nevertheless, the ideal is that anyone can become an American, a pluribus unum. So we could step up a level from groups, use our capacity to define us versus them, broaden

the definition and say we're all Americans. And this, in my view, is one strategy we could literally cognitively employ to break down some of these tribal barriers. But there's another strategy that's less obvious and that's equally important and equally a part of our tradition, and that's to important and equally a part of our tradition. And that's to step down a level to the level of individuals. And here's an interesting thing. We humans have evolved the capacity for individual identity. And this is actually really odd. It's an odd paradox that in order to live socially, we first have to be individuals. And what do I mean by that? socially, we first have to be individuals.

And what do I mean by that? Well, we communicate our individual identity with our faces. Every human face is different than every other human face. And it turns out that this capacity to have individual faces is unusual in the animal kingdom. And not only that, but you can look at a sea of a thousand or 10,000 faces, and you can tell the difference between every other face. And this cognitive machinery you have in your brain is also a luxury. These are evolutionary luxuries. The capacity to signal and detect individual identity are evolutionary luxuries, which our species and a few others

manifest. And in fact, they are necessary to live socially because you have to be able to tell, you know, this is my child, not someone else's child that I should raise. Or this is a friend and not an enemy. Or this is a person who cooperated with me or did not cooperate with me. So in order to live with each other, we have to be able to detect the individual identity of each person. And natural selection has given us this capacity. Incidentally, as a tangent on a tangent, this capacity is also connected to our ability to experience grief, which is another whole topic. Anyway. I'd like to not lose sight of that footnote, but I can say that as someone who is regularly mistaken for Ben Stiller, our capacity to recognize individual faces is not what it might be.

Yes, it's true. And I can tell you, like, I am, I am, I have my own limitations in this regard, specifically with respect to people's names, although I'm pretty good with faces. I can tell if I've seen, I wouldn't mistake you for Ben Stiller, Sam. I don't know if that's a compliment or not, but I'll take it. Yes, that is. But anyway, so finishing up this point, this part of the point, I mean, that's why I love talking to you. It's like we could go in 10 different directions. But just finishing up this part of the point. So this capacity to see each other as individuals also provides a kind of liberation for the dehumanization of tribalism. We can step down a level. And this has been a part of our tradition too. In fact, this is what Martin Luther King was arguing when

he said, you know, he looks forward to a time when people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. He's saying we should treat each other as individuals, and he's totally right. And this also effaces tribalism. So tribalism, groupiness, which is a problem in our society today, is a part of our nature. It's depressing, at least to me, this preference of us versus them. Exists for a number of reasons, but we have other tools at our disposal that evolution has equipped us with to cooperate as a collective and avoid some of the downsides of tribalism. Well, that's a fascinating analysis. Actually, I detected in there a point of contact between the two levels that I had never really thought about before. But you were describing a way of

escaping tribalism by going up a level and acknowledging that anyone who essentially can come in and share our values is part of our group. So this effaces racism and xenophobia and religious bigotry and at least potentially everything accidental about a person that could keep him out of our group or keep him or her as them can be erased provided that person buy into certain ideas and certain ethical norms, presumably. But one of those core ideas, one of those norms, one of those political values that we're anchored to is the primacy of the individual, at least for most intents and purposes. So that individual freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of belief, the freedom to be uncoerced and unmolested by one's neighbors, provided what you're doing isn't bringing harm to anyone else, a kind of classically liberal picture of the political landscape, that is one of the core values that so many of us share. It does seem like those two algorithms for escaping tribalism coincide, at least on that point.

for escaping tribalism coincide, at least on that point? Well, first of all, I mean, I think you are highlighting, I mean, just to say that the things that you, the things that, the qualities that define the larger group need not be political qualities. I mean, the example you just gave about, and then we were talking about America, you could, in principle, broaden the group. For example, when the Hutus and the Tutsis were slaughtering each other,

they could have broadened the group to say, you know, we are Africans, for example, or we are, you know, some other, you know, we're descendants of this original settlers or whatever. I mean, you could, or if you have the Shiites and the Sunnis that are killing each other, they could say, well, wait a minute, we're both Muslim, for example. You know, so it doesn't have to be a political affiliation. I was just using our country as an example. But you're right to highlight that in our particular case, one of those founding beliefs that defines this higher order group is paradoxically a kind of commitment to individual, you know, the rights of individuals. And you're also then, I think,

alluding to, you know, the well understood challenge of, you know, pop of individuals and you're also then i think alluding to you know the well understood challenge of you know poppers the open society and its enemies yeah you know this this notion that there is a sense in which our tolerance could actually be uh in our openness could actually be our undoing so which is a whole other topic and a whole other thing to discuss. We can solve that in 15 minutes. Yeah, exactly. We had left a number of footnotes behind, though. I don't want to lose the point you were making about grief, and then I want to back all the

way up and go more systematically through your thesis. But what were you saying about grief and individuation? Well, grief, I mean, grief is, so here's the thing about grief. And I talk about grief in the book. I mean, I was a hospice doctor for many years. I took care of people who were dying, I don't know, for 15 years in Chicago and then at Harvard when I was on the faculty there. And I had my own personal experience with grief. My mother was terminally ill when I was a child. She was diagnosed when I was six and she died when I was 25. She was just 47 when she died. And so, you know, I grew up with this.

I would suspect if I had to guess, maybe half your audience or a third of your audience would have had personal experience with grief, had someone they know died. This is less common in the modern world than it used to be, where often children would die. So people would have siblings or offspring that had died. But anyway, anyone who's had the experience of grief knows that it's this extraordinary particular kind of pain. It can be a physical pain. Your jaw hurts from clenching and crying, and your chest hurts. And emotionally, it's just agony. And then you have all these other cognitive processes. You see the dead person in a crowd. I mean, I've had this experience. And you know they're dead, but your heart wishes they were alive. And it's, you know, novels have been written about it. I mean, it's

an incredibly profound human experience, this experience of grief. But the thing about grief is that it's unlike any other emotion. It's not sadness, right? It's something different. Like your sadness, I think, is very similar to my sadness. But your grief is rather different than my grief because it's connected to the death of a particular person. You grieve not when a stranger dies.

You grieve when when a stranger dies. You grieve when a very particular individual close to you dies. So grief is connected to our individuality. But one of the ironies is that we're not the only animals to feel grief. And certain other animals do. Now, these are particular animals. These are other social mammals that have evolved to live like we do. And I discuss those in the book. This includes, for example, elephants and whales, certain whale species, certain primate species. And there's a deep irony here, which I'll come back to the grief thing in a moment, that actually by examining the ways in which our social lives are similar to these other animals, we can better understand how we are similar to each other. In other words, the more our friendships resemble

the friendships of elephants, the more our friendships are the same the world over. And we can better understand the fact that friendship is a human universal, or grief is a human universal, or the capacity to recognize individuals is a human universal, when we find analogous qualities to those in animal species like elephants. So the last common ancestor we had with elephants was about 85 million years ago. It was a small shrew-like mammal. As far as we know, it did not live socially. And here, these elephants, over 85 million years. They evolve a way of living socially by convergent evolution that's very, very similar to our own. They have friendships like we do, for example.

And they grieve, many of the most expert ethologists of elephants believe, like we do or similar to we do. So anyway, so grief is a very interesting itself phenomenon, and I think it reflects our individuality, and it's part of our sociality as well. So let's talk about the biological underpinnings of all of this, or the evolutionary underpinnings. So you referred to the social suite. What is the social suite?

Well, I'd like to back up even from that just one step and say, you know, I think there's been a lot of attention in the sciences and in the public sphere to the way in which humans have evolved to, you know, be inveterately bad, you know, our propensity for violence and selfishness and mendacity. Yeah, we started with tribalism. Yeah. I mean, all of these qualities, but equally we have been shaped for good. We've been shaped to love, to have a capacity for love and friendship and cooperation and teaching and many other fine qualities. And I think these wonderful qualities have, you know, this bright side has been denied the attention that it deserves. And so, and moreover, I would argue, this bright side is even more important. Keep in mind, I'm talking about the sweep of our evolution. So over the last 10,000 years. But these larger forces shaped us for many, many years.

They're deeper, I would argue, and more profound and certainly more ancient than the historical forces acting upon us today. And these forces shaped us for good because if whenever I came near you, you killed me or you filled me with lies, you know, you gave me useless or false information or you filled me with lies, you know, you give me useless or false information, or you are otherwise mean to me or violent towards me, I would be better off living as a solitary animal. So the benefits of a connected life must have outweighed the costs. And natural selection has acted on our ways of living socially as surely as it has acted on our bodies and on our psychology. So one of the macro arguments of the book is that our genes and natural selection have

shaped not just the structure and function of our bodies, not just the structure and function of our minds, but also the structure and function of our societies. And it has primarily equipped us with, on balance, good qualities. And there are eight that I highlight in the book, eight qualities that we are, eight features of this suite of qualities that make it possible for us to live together. And these are, first of all, the capacity to love and, I'm sorry, to have and recognize individual identity. So this capacity to be individuals and recognize individuals. A love for partners and offspring. We're very unusual as a species in that we don't just mate with each other. We form a sustained and actually sentimental attachment. We love the people we have

sex with. We don't always do, but we can and typically do. Friendship is a third important quality. We form long-term non-reproductive unions with other members of our species. We're not the only animal that does it, but it's rare. And the other animals we already talked about, one, elephants, and there's a couple of others, a few others. Social networks, we form social networks. Cooperation, a preference for one's own group or in-group bias that we talked about earlier, a kind of mild hierarchy or relative egalitarianism. So we are an animal that neither is totally egalitarian nor too authoritarian or too hierarchical. We don't function well when we have no leaders. hierarchical. We don't function well when we have no leaders, and we also don't like it when we have autocratic leaders, people who can impose too much punishment from above. And finally, we've

evolved this capacity for social learning and teaching, which is also rare in the animal kingdom and is astonishing. So many animals can learn, you know, little fish in the sea can learn that if it swims towards the light, it finds food there. We don't just learn that way. We also learn by imitation or socially. So and this is very efficient. You know, I could put my hand in the fire and I learn that it's hot. I pull my hand out. I have acquired some knowledge, but I paid a big price. Or I could watch you put your hand in the fire and I gain almost as much knowledge, but I paid none of the price. That's very efficient. Or you could teach me not to put my hand in the fire.

And so we don't just learn individually. We don't just learn socially, but we actually set out to teach each other stuff. This is very rare in the animal kingdom, but we do it. teach each other stuff. This is very rare in the animal kingdom, but we do it. So these are all of these qualities, all of these fundamental aspects of our human nature, you will notice, pertain to how we interact with each other. So there's a whole other class of things, for example, our musicality, for instance, or our risk aversion, or other kinds of, or our visual cognition, for example, all of which are other parts of human nature, but those can be experienced by isolated individuals, by a hermit in the mountains can have

a religious experience, for example. But I'm interested in the parts that require the presence of another person in order to reach their fruition. And so that's what I call the social suite. It's a suite of eight qualities that natural selection has shaped and that equip us to live together as a social species. Right, right. Does that phrase social suite originate with you? Yes. Nice. It's a very useful grouping. And I would point out that these things are not, in principle, entirely isolated from one another. I mean, they interpenetrate each other. So when you were discussing hierarchy there, in the book you differentiate at least two different types of hierarchy.

There are dominance hierarchies and there are hierarchies based on prestige. And those function differently. I mean, they're both important, or at least have been important to us as social primates. But prestige matters more and more, one could argue, the more civilized we become. And prestige is the kind of thing that relates to some of these other capacities, like the capacity to teach. Yes. So there's a lot going on there among those eight characteristics. Yeah. I mean, so you're absolutely right. They're all interrelated in very complex and interesting ways. But just on the prestige thing, so just a dominance hierarchy has to do with the kind

of costs that superiors can impose on their subordinates. And a dominance hierarchy has to do with the kind of costs that superiors can impose on their subordinates. And a prestige hierarchy relates to the kind of benefits that a subordinate can extract or get from a superior. simplification, but the dominance hierarchy often relates to how physically, you know, I'm bigger than you, and therefore I can punish you or exclude you from mating opportunities, for example. And therefore, in a dominance hierarchy, subordinates avoid superordinates. But in a prestige hierarchy, in which I can bestow benefits upon you, I can teach you something useful, like how to light a fire or make a stone tool, for example. Now you don't avoid me, you seek me out. And I can attract, acquire power and attract followers, as it were, not by virtue of the costs I can impose on my subordinates, but by virtue of the benefits, which typically are cognitive things I can teach them on my subordinates and that my

subordinates can, and that a subordinate can get from a subordinate. And in our species, we have evolved these parallel ways of having hierarchy, which both of which are important. It can be important in different circumstances and at different times, but the existence of this kind of prestige type of hierarchy connects, as you said, to this teaching and learning function our species has, and also is connected therefore to our capacity for culture. It's interesting not to keep bringing this back to Trump, to this teaching and learning function our species has, and also is connected, therefore, to our capacity for culture. It's interesting not to keep bringing this back to Trump, which is a sin I have not committed very often. I really have not spoken about him for a very long time. I'm worried you're associating anything I say with him. No, no, but I think I'm getting

ready to read the Mueller report, so he's on my mind. But it just occurred to me that one of the things I find so odious about him is that his status among those who purport to love him does seem to almost entirely depend on the dominance side rather than the prestige side. the dominance side rather than the prestige side. Yeah, the harm that he can impose on others is what some people find appealing. This is perhaps especially true of the other Republican politicians who are supporting him. Despite the fact that he violates so many of their declared values, it's obvious that they're worried about the political harm he can do to them based on his ability to drum up the base and their comparative inability to do so. There's something just sickening about it. That's right. I mean, I think that's, and you see this in different, you see this in politicians.

I mean, politicians will exploit. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.