Among those who followed the campus culture wars of the 2010s, the name of Yale sociology professor Nicholas Christakis will ring an instant bell.
For the uninitiated: in 2015, Christakis, then the master of Yale’s Silliman College, ran afoul of the campus mob after his wife, fellow professor Erika Christakis, dared to question the woke orthodoxy on culturally appropriative Halloween costumes. As punishment for being married to a thoughtcriminal, Christakis ended up alone in a Yale courtyard, surrounded by dozens of angry students who took turns berating him as he tried in vain to reason with them.
The ugly incident was filmed, and Christakis rose to national prominence and widespread admiration. He was held up as a laudable example of a professor willing to take a stand for classical liberal values such as free speech and free inquiry, a commitment he affirmed in a subsequent New York Times op-ed.
In light of this, it is supremely disappointing, half a decade later, to see Christakis turn his back on those very same Enlightenment values he once championed.
Christakis, who is a physician as well as a sociologist, has for the past two years been one of the leading public commentators on the pandemic. During that time, he has used his considerable academic and public profile to promote an utterly illiberal model of disease control. In his disregard for the values of a free and open society, he has come to resemble – in substance if not in style – nothing so much as the Yale mob which once tried to silence him.
On March 9, 2020, just as the initial global panic was spreading and a voice of calm reason was most needed, Christakis took to Twitter and posted a lengthy thread in admiration of China’s pandemic response. Weeks earlier, China had taken the drastic step of locking down nearly a billion of its people, a move Christakis acknowledged was unprecedented.
Because China had “a collectivist culture and an authoritarian government,” he wrote, it was “well-suited to fight a pandemic.” The lockdowns were “a social nuclear weapon” and “an astonishing achievement from a public health point of view.” He concluded that “(China’s) success fighting COVID-19, while deeply impressive, will not be easy to reproduce elsewhere. The USA must prepare to combat the virus using tools at its disposal. It will not be easy.”
In this thread, Christakis expressed no regard for the human rights of the unfortunate people of China, nor any concern about the moral (as opposed to practical) ramifications of importing such measures to the West. Were he a paid propagandist for the Chinese Communist Party, he could not have done a better job of denigrating the American system and promoting the Chinese one.
Advocates of authoritarian systems have always touted their purported superiority in upholding order and facilitating mass collective action. To see a man of Christakis’ intellectual heft and stature falling prey to such a trite, unconvincing argument should provide sufficient warning that none of us are safe from the totalitarian impulse.
These sentiments were not a careless one-off on Christakis’ part. He repeated them, at times almost word-for-word, in a Medium post, an interview with Amanpour and Company, and a podcast with Sam Harris, among other places. These are well worth reading and listening to in their entirety, to get a full glimpse of the depth and breadth of his authoritarian tendencies. Such sentiments were also reiterated throughout his book, Apollo’s Arrow – which, published in October 2020, was one of the first serious treatises on the pandemic.
Long before the idea had entered the public discussion, Christakis argued for an “immunity passport” program that would provide “the freedom to travel, return to school, go to places of worship, resume employment, or make use of online-dating services,” and said that “Differentiation based on immune status sounds creepy but is not necessarily ethically problematic.”
At another point, he praised the Czech Republic for mask mandate police enforcement that “converted a purely voluntary individual action into an accepted collective one,” but sniped at anti-mandate protestors in America who “framed it as an issue of personal liberty, holding signs that read MY BODY, MY CHOICE, a cynical reference to pro-choice arguments in the abortion debate.”
And yet “My body, my choice” is a principle that goes far deeper than either abortion or masks. It is one rooted in long-standing Western notions of bodily autonomy. This is why pro-choice activists adopted the phrase in the first place, so as to bolster their argument (whether legitimately or not) through an appeal to a widely shared value. Opponents of mask (and now vaccine) mandates who use the phrase are making the same appeal – while simultaneously calling out the hypocrisy of those who support both abortion and mandates.
Christakis concluded his book on a particularly ominous note, writing that the pandemic “fostered a recognition of the importance of collective will” which could be used to tackle causes like climate change, and saying that “(E)ffective disease containment, by definition, puts the needs of the collective ahead of the needs of individuals.”
In fact, the American system is based on a framework of rights, not “needs.” It was this very framework that permitted Christakis and his wife to voice an unpopular opinion on cultural appropriation, in which their right to free expression trumped the “need” of the student protestors for emotional safety.
As to Christakis’ promotion of the “collective,” that is only a sum total of individuals, and the notion that a collective can have rights separate from those of its component members is a foolish one indeed. This should be apparent even when dealing with a virus: it is only individual people that can become sick, after all.
Individualism matters because individuals, and not collectives, are capable of reason. Most of the students who attacked Christakis in 2015 would probably have been reasonable in a calm one-on-one setting. At a couple of points, he almost seemed to get through to some of them, before the mob dynamic reasserted itself. They were only monsters collectively, once they renounced their personal identities.
Even the title Apollo’s Arrow is revelatory. So named for a passage in The Iliad where the god Apollo strikes the Greeks with a plague, it suggests a world in which personal decisions matter little, in which we all exist at the mercy of the gods – that is to say, vast impersonal forces beyond our control. The sense of general despair that has swept our culture over the past two years is the product of this sort of thinking, which is antithetical to all notions of self-determination.
Christakis is a man of very different demeanor from the students who once jeered and mocked him. But although he may express himself less savagely, his ideas would lead in the end to the same essential result: a society which no longer protects the inalienable rights of every citizen, which abandons its classical liberal foundations in the name of a subjectively defined greater good. Whether we arrive there by way of “public health” or “social justice,” the final destination will be just as bleak.