YES, THAT WORLD, WHERE ignorance, mindlessness, bigotry, and dullness have had such a long and bullish run that assholery should be classified as a collective growth industry. Stupidity is exhausting to encounter, especially when it shows up, as Hamlet put it, not as “single spies, but battalions.”
Then you sit down and have a good talk with David.
His intelligence is almost uniquely complex—ever curious, fluid, surprising you with its tangents and speculative flights. It’s an intelligence that has its own presence, that seems to permeate the room, to both stimulating and salutary effect. I become very relaxed.
I look around David’s office, and outside. The isolated Hyde Park Road headquarters of the Santa Fe Institute, a cross-disciplinary aggregation of some of the smartest freaking people on the planet, is at once perching upon and protected by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. SFI is inhabited by scientists who are grounded in empirical fact, but come here to interrogate those facts, hopefully to come up with something new.
Krakauer, it turns out, can be very funny, mostly with intention. You feel gratified when he laughs at your jokes. I understand why one of his staff thinks he is the perfect subject for the perfect prank (as yet not hatched).
So today, I do not have to take up arms against a sea of fetid troubles with ridiculous if not downright dangerous people bobbing in it. Today, I don’t need to feel I must do something, or if not, report for detention to my better angels (assuming they have not already fled for cover).
The world needs some help—glad these guys at SFI are on the case.
Do you think people in Santa Fe broadly understand what SFI does?
No, and that’s surprising and not surprising. Let’s just step outside of science. If someone asks you, “Do you know what Google does?” You’d say, “Yeah, they’re a search engine.” But that’s not what it does. Google is developing algorithms to support searches, yes, but there’s infinitely more to Google. I think what makes SFI difficult is that it doesn’t have a widget. If we had a widget, they’d say, “We know what SFI does.” It makes it harder because there’s nothing tangible that you can hold in your hand and say, “This is SFI.” But a lot of network science used by companies like Google was developed here, though we don’t commercialize it, don’t profit from it. And it’s also because a lot of people are not profoundly interested in radicalism—which is the basis of our science. But happily, this town is above average in its curiosity, and the fact that we have around 800 people who come to a science lecture, that’s pretty amazing. That’d be amazing in New York City.
At SFI, there is this almost rogue feeling that the conventional wisdom may well be wrong.
It’s a paradoxical place, right? On the one hand, it looks very established, because it’s here because of the Manhattan Project. So, that looks very “military industrial complex.” But then you have to remember the odd eccentric characters who were here at that time, starting with Oppenheimer, and the sort of culture they created.
SFI was founded much later, in 1983 to ’84, around some interesting figures, most notably George Cowan and Murray. [Cowan was SFI’s founding president, Murray Gell-Mann was a co-founder]. The founders of SFI were intellectually extraterrestrial…just off the charts. But this was the generation that was also very polymathic. It does not tend to be true in science now; even with really gifted scientists, specialties tend to be very narrow.
These guys were saying, “Look, there are incredibly difficult problems. Why are they being ignored?” Because they’re not situated squarely in a specific department. It’s not an economics problem, it’s not a sociology problem, a geography problem, it’s all boundary stuff… margin stuff. And I think they were smart enough to realize that the margin is bigger—that the surrounding perimeter is larger than the territory. And maybe, in that weird interstitial marginal area that falls between the cracks of fields, there are whole new theories to be discovered. That was the hubris. It wasn’t just, “We should do that stuff because it’s being ignored,” but because it’s also a goldmine, because the result will be whole new theories as profound as relativity. It was a conjunction of super smarts that I’m not sure the earth has anymore, to be honest—that mixture of naivety, opportunity, utopianism.
To have a group of people starting with the radical idea of upending seems…radical.
It is and it’s not. I don’t think it’s intellectually radical, because it’s just obvious…because you would ask the question, “What happens when you combine, say, salt and pepper; what if I add them to this dish?” On the one hand, yes, any child would do that experiment. What’s radical was that all of the existing superstructure…the institutional support, was not there for it. The typical university department, tenure, journals, the bookshelves and labels and categories…that they had to fight. It’s a radical move to say, “We’re going to take on that history.”
And a lot of resistance to the idea, presumably.
Yes, but you have to remember who these people were, and that one way of short-circuiting the forces of reaction is to present their own champions. There are two ways of being revolutionary, as far as I’m aware. You can be a no one and be a revolutionary, right? You can make yourself up, establish your own reputation as a revolutionary without having had an accredited history. Think of someone like Francis Bacon as a painter—just radical out of the gate. Or you can be a Picasso kind of radical and say, “I’ve already demonstrated my bona fides. I had a blue period, now I get to be Cubist.” SFI was like that; it said, “Wait a minute. We all have Nobel prizes; don’t you tell me what’s good or bad. And now I get to be totally maverick.”
But in terms of the resistance you spoke of, if someone’s going to say to you, “All those ideas you had about something: You might want to question them,” a lot of people would get a bit of vertigo upon hearing that. And that’s, I think partly, what we’re contending with here, a persistent approach that communicates, “I’m perfectly comfortable with what I think I know, and I’d rather you didn’t tell me that a lot of it is probably not true.” A lot of people are simply not interested in that.
Or science.
Oh, yes. I have been to parties…will walk into a room and people will ask, “What do you do?” I’ll say I’m a scientist, and they walk away.
Really?
Yeah, because they wanted to talk to you about their, say, artistic theories, or some other realm. Now, the thing is, that means they’re not being true to art or science, right, by doing that?
So, embedded in this place is a persistent non-belief in conventionality.
That’s one of the tragedies of our time: Good scholarship, irrespective of science, should be irreverent. It’s what you’re trying to do; you’re trying to kill your parents. What happens, though, is that a lot of systems become institutional.
I’ve got this three-part idea of creative life. People have different phases. I use “mountains,” “monasteries,” and “metropolis.” There’s a phase where you want to be, “Leave me the fuck alone,” a moment in your creative life when you just have to think and not be bothered by others…that’s the mountain. Then there’s a period where you want to test your idea, but with friendly peers who are not going to just shoot it down for its own sake. They’ll say, “Let’s engage with this idea, and we’ll tell you what we think of it.” That’s what monasteries are. But then you take it to the metropolis, which is just overtly hostile. It says, “You have to prove, demonstrate to us the value of your ideas.” And I think SFI is a mountain—kind of a monastery and a mountain combined—but we also have a huge network in the metropolis. I think one of the problems with the standard university, standard scholarship, is that they try to make one place all three—where this is going to be the great place you have solitude and to mix with other people, and my feeling is that’s just bullshit. Instead, you accept that there are different types of contexts and build a very strong version of one of them and address the deficits in the other two.
What does Santa Fe do for you?
I’ve been here on and off about 15 years. There’s the Southwest, there’s New Mexico, and there’s Santa Fe. They’re not at all the same thing. Cormac McCarthy is a Miller Scholar and Trustee here, and this is something I talk with him about a lot…the desert, the high desert, and the origin of mythologies in deserts. Mythologies tend not to come from super-luscious environments, but from austere ones.
It was great place for Jesus to go. But why?
[Laughs] Yes, it’s a good place for prophets. There’s also fanaticism, derangement, but also just time and space to think uninterrupted, which is perhaps the most important thing—not to be constantly accosted. So, the desert matters, and it matters for us. And as I said, there’s a historical connection in Santa Fe because of Los Alamos. But then there’s this other thing in Santa Fe, right, which is this weird intersection of forms. There’s a kind of self-invention extremism…where personalities are a little bit on the edge. There are the creative communities, artists, scientists, seekers. Another element for me here is that it’s a place a lot of people want to sample. There’s no point building the Santa Fe Institute in some place where you wouldn’t want to go. It’s not hard to convince someone to come here, but to come here forever is hard.
Your resume seems like an upward arc of approval, yet you have this almost subversive attitude about things, and you keep questioning.
The cop-out answer is that’s true to what scholarship should be in the Socratic sense, in the most profound sense…this notion that science is belief in the ignorance of experts. It’s not about authority, but about challenging it constantly. So, if you set yourself up as being, like, “We have the final answer,” you’re just totally in contravention of the whole fucking premise. I would say that’s the deepest thing, that all ideas are approximate; everything we believe today in 50 years will be laughed at. And too much scholarship, I think, has become about the narrowing of the mind. If you ask me why, I think it’s the market…it’s economics. I think that academia was completely infiltrated by market thinking, and it was a disaster. Universities started to compete for research dollars from funding agencies. At a certain point, they could then file for intellectual property, so they started running businesses.
When we’re renewing faculty, one question on my list is, “Are you doing the thing where you’re always going to be the master, where everyone in the room defers to you because you have that prep, or are you going to be the person who says, ‘I have no idea what this is. Can someone help explain this to me?’” I’ll ask, “Are you prepared to be a student again and again and again? And if you are, then you’re totally welcome here. And if mastery is all you care about, that’s brilliant. There are plenty of other places you can go and be a master.”
What are your thoughts on how this country dealt with COVID-19?
For us, that was a real wake-up call. It was a realization that, “Oh my God, this virus infected the economy and infected businesses, and it infected our minds.” Metaphorically, right? But that was huge. The thing that shocked us, and I think no one predicted it, was the conjunction of deep-seated science skepticism and conspiracy theory on the one hand, and a hostile government under Trump that, as far as I could tell, did not want us to recover as a nation. And the reasons for that remain mysterious to me.
We’ve dealt with folks who are anti-vaxxers, and I’ve spoken to a number of people who are suspicious. I want to make a distinction between people who are totally justifiably unaware of the science and feel as if the development of the vaccine might have been cavalier, and hence it would be premature to be vaccinated…there is that contingent. But then there’s another side, this group that thinks the moon is made of cheese and the earth is flat and all that stuff, and who have another belief system which is completely at odds with being reasonable, and at odds with evidence.
Clearly, the need for good evidence has never been greater, and for novel ways of providing it. How can SFI talk to more people?
We’ve been doing experiments with television, which are much more populist, to the extent that I actually get in trouble. People say, “No, that’s dumbing it down to an unacceptable degree.” It’s an interesting question, and we all have to make our own judgment calls on where we put that threshold. You can go as simple as you possibly can…up to the point where ideas start metamorphosing into bullshit.
In a recent study of folks who were infected, virtually everyone in that group was not vaccinated, and virtually everyone who didn’t get it was. It is right there. But, a thing that’s self-evident seems not sufficient; it needs to be explained, and still people are resisting. There are certain areas that are so contentious, with so many trade-offs and competing interests, that even if you are supremely simple and lucid, you could not convey that idea because people will resist it. Now, that’s a crappy excuse for not being more comprehensible [laughs], but it could be true.
…That clear scientific ideas are sometimes not so clear?
Yes, absolutely. Take something like gravity. This is research that’s been around for a long time, in a gazillion textbooks, in children’s books! But we actually barely understand that force, if we’re absolutely honest about it. These concepts
are difficult, so translating things without dumbing them down excessively, while still being true to them—that’s a big deal.
Sam Shepard was a Miller Scholar at the Institute. Memorably, your assistant explained, “Well, Sam didn’t believe in science, and David loved him.” Why?
Lots of reasons. People like Cormac McCarthy as a novelist, and then Sam Shepard as a playwright, are quite exceptional. When I first talked to Sam, it was obvious that this was a guy who’s restless, who wanted to understand everything. He was very curious, asked us about everything. He might not be a scientific mind, but was interested…constantly asking, “How does the brain work? What is this consciousness thing? What do you think about that?” He was like a child, as everyone should be. That’s not a negative thing, it’s a positive thing. He came up, spent some time here, and the great surprise to Sam—I think more a surprise to him than it was to us—was that Sam did not want to leave. He was on and off here for three years. And he told Cormac, “I didn’t realize that I had to be institutionalized.” [Laughs]
So, that’s the funny version. The real version was that he would never be found dead in a writer’s colony—didn’t want to be around people who would fawn over him (most people here didn’t know who he was) or engage in endless discussion about what he’s working on and why. But what he did want was to be in an environment of curious minds who actually could answer a few questions that he might ask. Yeah, I think that Sam’s got the spirit of what we try to find in people.
And I have to say personally, I’ve always been interested in explorers. Shackleton, Scott, Wallace [Alfred Russel Wallace] and others…Freya Stark and Gertrude Bell. I’m interested in what it means to explore and why people are drawn to it, and don’t really care if it’s them in their living room exploring their internal mind or if they’re out in the world, though I do tend to emphasize the latter because of the obvious risks. But you see it—see the explorer type—that they want to do something, discover something. They don’t want to sit still. And Sam had exactly that, totally.
And risk seems a part of the DNA here.
But risk is such a tricky term because everyone is taking risks, right? It’s so cheap. But I will say that SFI is risky in the following sense: we don’t have tenure. None of the risk-minimizing structures exist here. If you’re not good, you will be removed. There’s no job security. When I signed my contract as president, it had the best sentence in the history of job offer letters. It read: “We can remove you from your position for any reason, or no reason whatsoever.” [Laughs]
We all should be canned occasionally in our professional lives. It keeps you young.
Yeah, and a little restless.
What keeps you up at night?
The big answer to that is stupidity and its manifestations. Racism, sexism, and lesser crimes, and, additionally, the ones deleterious to the planet, like the denying of climate change and so forth. These are all instances, as far as I’m concerned, of human stupidity, which is just following rules or irrational biases or norms that make no sense. And that is what keeps me up. I don’t understand how to undo it.
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Photo Kate Joyce
