by Matthew Syed
Inhabitants of the building down the years included the Acoustics Lab, Adhesives Lab, Linguists Department, Guided Missiles Program Office, Lab for Lighting Design, Office of Naval Research, Model Railroad Club and more. ‘At this time in history, these researchers would have never shared the same facilities – the biologists would have studied in the life science building, and the lighting designers would have been drafting away in the architecture building’, David Shaffer, an architect, has written. ‘Scientists from diverse fields got to know one another in a unique and exciting way that produced unparalleled cross-departmental collaboration.’
Another unusual feature of Building 20 is that the rather flimsy walls could be torn down when they got in the way of fruitful collaboration. ‘If you want to wire from one room to another, you don’t call Physical Plant [maintenance],’ Paul Penfield, the engineering professor, has said. ‘Instead you get out a power drill and jam it through the wall.’ In his book Messy, Tim Harford writes: ‘Who would have thought that throwing the electrical engineers in with the model railway club would result in hacking and video games?’53
You can see the power of networks in the history of cultural institutions, too.54 Football has been an incubator of recombination, particularly in the domain of tactics. This can be seen in everything from the WM approach of the legendary Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman to the defensive Italian catenaccio. The economist Raffaele Trequattrini has shown that these innovations led to a sustained competitive advantage.
The same can be said of the total football revolution in Holland, perhaps the most vivid instance of recombination in sport. Football fans might be surprised to discover that Dutch football was once highly insular. Ideas from beyond the game were seen as threats, not opportunities. When, in 1959, a new physio arrived at Ajax and saw that the medical facility consisted of a wooden table and blanket, he offered to buy a modern treatment table. ‘Don’t poison the atmosphere’, the coach responded. ‘We’ve been doing it for fifty years on this table.’
It took a young coach with an outsider mindset called Rinus Michels to challenge this insularity. He imported ideas from beyond the game not only to transform tactics and training, but inspire professionalisation. Before his time, almost all of the players worked in normal jobs away from the game, including Johan Cruyff, one of the greats of Dutch football, who worked shifts at a local printing factory. Training became more ‘imaginative, intensive and far more intelligently focused’.
In his fine book Brilliant Orange, the author David Winner traces these shifts to wider trends in Dutch society which was, itself, opening up to new ideas. ‘After 20 years of peace, there were unparalleled opportunities for international cultural cross-pollination . . . Nowhere was youth rebellion fuelled by so surreal, anarchic and theatrical a sense of playfulness as in Amsterdam.’
Johan Cruyff was central to the transformation. Karel Gabler, a former youth coach who ‘grew up amid the ruins of Amsterdam’s old Jewish district, where the 1960s seemed like an eruption of colour into a world of monochrome’, said: ‘Cruyff got into all kinds of conflicts because he started asking the question the whole generation was asking, “Why are things organised like this?” ’
In his book The Talent Lab, the journalist Owen Slot examines the success of British Olympic sport, which shifted from a low point of one gold medal at the Atlanta Games of 1996, to twenty-nine at the London Games of 2012. One of British sport’s key appointments was Scott Drawer as head of R&D, a scientist with a PhD in sports science and a thirst for new ideas. One of his first actions was to look beyond sport, to academia and industry, to find engineers and inventors who might bring novel insights to the question of how to help athletes go faster. His group came together at the Wagon Wheel of its time, a meeting room in Sheffield, where individual scientists were plugged in to a new, more diverse network. Drawer has said:
It wasn’t necessarily the best [group] in terms of academic expertise, but it was the best in terms of creativity, people who would listen, be curious, want to explore. The naivety was a real strength . . . When you get people in a place with a good environment where people can think like that, you can be amazed where it goes.55
The recombinant results were remarkable:
F1 technology to help build winter Olympic bobsleighs, British Aerospace technology to build the skeleton sled on which Amy Williams won gold in Vancouver . . . sensors for swimmers to perfect the tumble turn . . . ‘hot pants’ for cyclists to wear to keep their muscles warm between races, liquid repellent that coated the spray skirt of Ed McKeever’s canoe in which he won gold in London.FN2 56
You can see the same pattern throughout history. Epochs that have managed to tear down the barriers between people, which have facilitated meaningful interaction, have driven innovation. There are dozens of examples, but one of the most remarkable is eighteenth-century Scotland, which despite being something of a backwater for centuries, and having just endured a period of political turmoil, emerged as a hub of the Enlightenment.
Scotland had developed an unusually extensive network of parish schools throughout the lowlands by the beginning of the eighteenth century, and had five universities (University of St Andrews, University of Glasgow, University of Edinburgh, Marischal College, University and King’s College of Aberdeen) compared with just two in England. All these institutions had chairs in mathematics, and offered high-quality lecture-based educations in economics and science.
The scene in Scotland was also highly social: ‘it was not a business of isolated individuals working in country estates, or of secluded academics, cloistered within unworldly universities. The scene was convivial.’57 Academics, scientists and merchants mixed together, not least at the lattice of clubs and societies that sprang up around this time. As one scholar put it: ‘The interconnections and cross-fertilisation between disciplines . . . is one of the remarkable features of the Scottish scene. Geologists associated with historians, economists with chemists, philosophers with surgeons, lawyers with farmers, church ministers with architects.’58
The Oyster Club had among its founders the economist Adam Smith, the chemist Joseph Black and the geologist James Hutton. The Select Society included the architect James Adam, the medic Francis Home and the philosopher David Hume. These were the Wagon Wheels and Roundhouses of the Scottish Enlightenment, ideas colliding and diffusing.
The blossoming of knowledge was remarkable. Hume wrote masterpieces in moral philosophy, political economy, metaphysics and history. Adam Smith, who was close friends with Hume, penned The Wealth of Nations, which remains arguably the most influential work in the history of economics. James Boswell wrote An Account of Corsica, James Burnett founded modern comparative historical linguistics, and James Hutton was a pioneering geologist. Sir John Leslie conducted important experiments with heat while Joseph Black discovered carbon dioxide.
Consider the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in isolation, and we might conclude that the flowering of knowledge occurred because the nation was blessed with an unusual number of great minds. It is only by taking a step back that we see that these minds blossomed only because they were plugged into such a diverse collective brain. As one visitor put it: ‘Here I stand, at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh and within a few minutes take fifty men of genius by the hand.’
5
Echo Chambers
I
Derek Black was still at primary school when he declared his commitment to white supremacism. By his teens he was helping to manage Stormfront, a forum that started out as an online bulletin board, but soon became the web’s first hate site. A 2001 USA Today article called Stormfront ‘the most visited white supremacist site on the net’.1 Black posted regularly, and moderated comments, helping white nationalists to build an online community. He was committed, strategic, and soon became central to both the website and the broader movement. Quick-witted and articulate, many regarded him as the crown prince of the cause, the person to whom people looked for new i
deas and slogans.
By his late teens, Derek was given his own slot – The Derek Black Show – on AM radio. He advocated the writings of Ernst Zündel, a German publisher who promoted Holocaust denial, and interviewed supremacist leaders such as Jared Taylor and Gordon Baum. The show was so popular that he was given a daily programme. He was a natural broadcaster.
He continued to manage and promote Stormfront, seeking to play down the link between users of the forum and episodes of mass violence. One study showed that in the five years leading up to 2014, Stormfront members murdered nearly 100 people, with 77 perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik, the man behind the 2011 Norway attacks2 – a murder rate that ‘began to accelerate rapidly in early 2009, after Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president’.
As a young adult, Derek became a fixture at supremacist gatherings, electrifying audiences as a platform speaker. He was developing a reputation as a potent thinker on racial repatriation. He won a seat on the Palm Beach Republican Executive Committee, but he was denied the position when the party found out about his extremist views.3
On the night Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, Stormfront crashed due to the sheer volume of traffic. This was a heady time for white nationalism, with their ranks swelling daily, and the new president receiving more than thirty death threats a month. Not long afterwards, Black was given high billing at a meeting of a white rights conference in Memphis. In his scintillating book Rising Out of Hatred, the journalist Eli Saslow sets the scene:
The Klansmen and neo-Nazis arrived for their meeting in the fall of 2008 dressed in suits with aliases written on their name tags and began sneaking into the hotel just after dawn. They walked past the protesters waving rainbow flags on the sidewalk, past the extra state troopers stationed outside the hotel lobby, past the FBI informants hoping to infiltrate their way inside . . . One suburb declared a state of emergency so it could hire additional police officers; another issued a temporary ban on all public gatherings. But by 7.00 on Saturday morning, about 150 of the world’s preeminent white nationalists had gathered inside a nondescript hotel conference room where a small sign hung on the wall. ‘The Fight to restore White America begins now’, it read.
In some ways, Derek was born to be a white nationalist leader. Don, his father, had joined the Ku Klux Klan in college and was rapidly promoted to Grand Wizard. In 1981, he was arrested alongside other white supremacists carrying dynamite, tear gas and other materials en route to attempt a coup on the island of Dominica. ‘They hoped to turn it into a white utopia,’ Saslow writes. He was sentenced to three years, learning computer skills during his incarceration that would enable him to set up the Stormfront website – to which his son would later become such an indispensable contributor.
As he witnessed Derek’s meteoric rise, Don was filled with pride. ‘I never thought it would feel so good to play second fiddle in my own house,’ he said. He felt that Derek had many strengths that he himself lacked, not least a supple intellect. The youngster was able to coin phrases that captured the public imagination. When Derek talked of ‘white genocide’ caused by mass immigration, Don noticed the way that it took hold, filtering into the mainstream.
As for Chloe, Derek’s mother, she also had a long association with the white nationalist movement. She married David Duke, one of the highest profile members of the Ku Klux Klan, in her twenties, and had two daughters with him. A few years after their divorce, she married Don, whom she had known for years in the circles of white nationalism. Duke was best man at their wedding.
Duke, the de facto leader of white supremacism in the United States, had spent his life trying to bring white ideology into the political mainstream. When he ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991, he won a majority of the white vote but narrowly lost the election. He was Derek’s godfather and ‘like a second dad’. He spent Christmases with the Blacks, socialised with them, and nurtured young Derek. It felt like he was grooming his successor.
By his late teens, Black was as well versed in the doctrines of white nationalism as he was comfortable in his own skin. His red hair fell down to his shoulders. He wore a black cowboy hat. He was personable and charming. People liked him. He didn’t use racist slurs or advocate physical attacks, instead using softer language to articulate his ideology. He wanted America to be all-white and for minorities, ultimately, to be forcibly expelled.
At the meeting in Memphis, Duke’s excitement was palpable as he presented the young prodigy to the mass of assembled supremacists. It felt like a defining moment. ‘The future of our movement is to become fully mainstream,’ Duke said. ‘I’d like to introduce you to the leading light of our movement. I don’t know anyone who has better gifts. He may have a much more extensive national and international career than I’ve had . . . Ladies and gentlemen, here is Derek Black.’4
II
The University of Kansas is the largest university in the sunflower state. Founded in 1865 on a hill in the town of Lawrence, it has since expanded to five campuses and is regarded as one of the most beautiful academic settings in the United States. ‘We embrace our role as the state’s flagship university and a premier research institution, serving the state, nation, and world,’ the website says. ‘We celebrate the energy and compassion that infuse the Jayhawk spirit.’
Speak to the students and academics, and you get a sense not just of the social buzz of the university, but also its scale. In total, there are almost 30,000 students, hailing from all corners of the United States, as well as from around the world. There are almost 3,000 students that are non-white, almost 6,000 are drawn from beyond the state of Kansas, and almost 2,000 over the age of twenty-five. This is a diverse population.5
Stand within the perimeter of any university, whether in Kansas or anywhere else, and you gain a fleeting impression of the organic way in which social networks emerge from the broader collection of students. People gravitate towards each other after lectures, hang out in the bars and clubs, developing friendships, many of which will have lifelong duration. Most people stay in touch with university friends long after graduation.
Over recent years, the way in which social networks are formed has become a major focus of scientific investigation. There have been many studies, but one of the most fascinating was led by Angela Bahns, an American psychology professor, into academic institutions in the state of Kansas. One of the establishments analysed was the University of Kansas. The researchers observed the students, watched as they hung out with their friends, and then gave them questionnaires so that they could probe the way they built friendships and social groups. In addition to the University of Kansas, they also studied five smaller universities in the state: Baker University in Baldwin City, Bethany College in Lindsborg, Bethel College in North Newton, Central Christian College in McPherson and McPherson College, also in McPherson.6
When I say these other universities are smaller, I mean much smaller. Baker University, a wonderful college with a rich history (it is the oldest academic establishment in the state, founded in 1858), has only three residence halls and two apartment buildings for students. It has a strong academic reputation and offers a selection of courses, but cannot match the scale of facilities of the marquee institutions in the United States.
Where the University of Kansas has a student population of almost 30,000, the other five universities have an average of barely 1,000. McPherson College has 629 students, Bethany College has 592 students and Bethel College has just 437 students. These colleges also, by implication, have lower overall demographic diversity. Bethel has just 105 students from outside Kansas, while Baker University and McPherson College have no students at all from overseas.7
Now, the question Bahns was seeking to answer was how these differences in background conditions influence the characteristics of the social networks within the institutions. How would they shape the way people made connections with each other? How would they influence the type of people they socialised with, and how they b
uilt long-term friendships? The answer at an intuitive level seems rather obvious. The University of Kansas, by sheer dint of scale, affords far more in the way of opportunities to meet people who think in different ways, who come from different backgrounds, who have different perspectives. The university is a cosmopolitan institution by virtue of its more formidable reach.
At Bethel College, on the other hand, the institution may be impressive, but its small size implies that opportunities to meet people who are different are far more restricted. For all its benefits of intimacy and warmth, a tiny student population must surely curtail the possibilities for meaningful interaction with people who think differently, act differently, or who just look a bit different.
When Bahns looked at the data, however, she found the complete opposite. The social networks at the University of Kansas were more homogenous, not just in terms of attitudes and beliefs, but also politics, moral convictions and prejudices. ‘It was a clear result, and completely different to what most people expect,’ Bahn told me. ‘When people are a part of broader communities, they are likely to construct networks that are more narrow.’
How is this possible?
Think back to the two campuses. At Kansas, there are lots of people. They are diverse, to be sure, but diversity has a paradoxical property. It means there are a lot of different people to potentially interact with, but it also means that there are many people who are very much like oneself. If one wants to hang out with the like-minded, they are not so very difficult to find. Sociologists call this ‘fine-grained assorting’.
At a smaller college with fewer people, on the other hand, there is less overall diversity. But this means that it is almost impossible to find someone who thinks or looks exactly like oneself. You have to compromise, to accept some minimum level of difference. The smaller the overall amount of diversity in the background population, the greater the limitations on finding conformity. Bahns says: