One of Shakespeare’s conceits is the wisdom of clowns. From Feste in Twelfth Night to the Fool in King Lear, they speak truth to power, but tell it slant and do so at their peril.

The stabbing last month of Salman Rushdie, who lived under threat of a decades-long fatwa for his comedic novel, The Satanic Verses, and Will Smith’s Oscars stage assault on Chris Rock remind us that satire is risky business: One person’s hilarity is another’s sacrilege. Satirists, comics, and fools are ideological pathfinders, risking their reputations, and sometimes their health and security, to chart terrain for the rest of us. Comedians are America’s modular, detachable consciences, at times challenging the status quo, at times serving it.

In his critique of pre-Enlightenment culture, Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued that long before America’s Bill of Rights enshrined free speech, “comic rites and cults, the clowns and fools, giants, dwarfs, and jugglers, the vast and manifold literature of parody” formed a sanctioned resistance to the “official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture.”

Fools were stabilizing forces in downtrodden societies, enabling peasant classes to lampoon the rich and vent their discontent with poverty, disease, violence, and a totalitarian church and state—within the bounds of stages and jokes.

Americans, too, have relied on comedians for subversive apprehensions of our national circumstance. Thomas Paine’s wry voice of American common sense planted seeds of our first revolution. American humor also served a unifying function after the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery, and again in the face of expanding American imperialism in Mark Twain’s satire.

Nineteenth-century America’s jester was the blackface minstrel, his artform employing comic skits and dancing, and freighted with tragic irony. Most minstrels were white men—often Irish and Italian immigrants—who caricatured the physicality of African slaves and freedmen, who had themselves developed show dance forms like the cakewalk to parody the mannerisms of white people. Like Bakhtin’s fools, minstrels performed a kind of acceptable populist subversion that gave rise to blackface literature like, for instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and a century later, dissident narratives such as Norman Mailer’s The White Negro, which called for (white) people to abandon postwar conformity for a more rebellious outlook, which Mailer associated with Black people.

Despite being compromised by the racist tropes of its era, minstrelsy amplified a bevy of art forms including jazz, tap dance, and the blues, which were also deemed subversive due, in part, to their origins in Black culture. Minstrel shows also featured authentic African American talents including Scott Joplin, who was known as the King of Ragtime; Gertrude “Ma” Rainey; and Charley Case, who is sometimes credited with inventing stand-up comedy.

Case’s father was an African American musician; his mother was Irish American. At a time when much of America fell under Jim Crow anti-miscegenation laws, Case performed unadorned narrations about his mixed heritage family while casually twisting a bit of string around his fingers. He became one of the nation’s highest-paid performers, and yet, off-stage, Case was known for his brooding, morose nature. He shot himself to death in a hotel room in 1916.

Today, America’s comedians have assumed the mantle of public intellectuals. Whether or not one agrees with them, their collective voices are arguably more pervasive and influential than those of traditional intellectuals like Nicholas Kristof or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And like Bakhtin’s clowns, modern comedians play a dual role in our society—sometimes stabilizing it, and other times challenging cultural norms.

On the day Donald Trump was elected president, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock appeared on Saturday Night Live to leaven what seemed a hopeless situation for half of the country’s voters. Rock ridiculed liberals’ surprise that Hillary Clinton lost; Chappelle struck a conciliatory note: “I’m wishing Donald Trump luck, and I’m going to give him a chance. And we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one, too.” (Chappelle later apologized for his naivete.)

And after at least 59 people were killed in Las Vegas in 2017, victims of the country’s deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman, survivors appeared on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show to make sense of the carnage.

In both instances, American stand-up comics helped smooth out high-stakes incidents. In other situations, comedians tested societal boundaries. DeGeneres herself went against the grain when she came out as a lesbian 25 years ago, depicting the first openly gay character on primetime television. As billionaire British Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling desperately rejected accusations that she was a “TERF,” Chappelle defended her and said he identified with that title. Comedian podcaster Joe Rogan has interviewed some of the nation’s most canceled figures—from a vocal vaccine skeptic to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones—inviting widespread protests and commanding ever larger audiences.

One of the reasons that comedians appeal to us so much, however, is that their intellectualism is played, first and foremost, for laughs. Comedy is performative, and whatever views they express may not be “real,” but all an act. “I talk shit for a living,” Rogan said in a stand-up routine earlier this year. “If you’re taking vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault? If you want my advice, don’t take my advice.”

Comedians’ riffs on sexual assault, gender identity, electoral politics, abortion, or any other off-limit discourses are creating new canons of critical literature, displacing the intellectual takes of popular academics of the past. But unlike treatises of old, when Jon Stewart rants about bat coronaviruses and burn pits, or Bill Burr takes on abortion rights, millions are listening, watching, guffawing, and sometimes, even agreeing.

Ask yourself: When was the last time you wanted to know what Francis Fukuyama, Noam Chomsky, or Cornel West thinks about a given topic? You’re more likely to wonder what HBO’s Real Time host Bill Maher said about it. It’s no accident that America’s most popular cable news program, Fox’s The Five, employs comedian Greg Gutfeld to speak about current events. The second most-watched cable news show is Tucker Carlson Tonight, which bounces between rightward diatribes and satirical snark.

In the age of social media, where a wrongfooted sentence can conflagrate a career built over a lifetime, comedians are our ideological crash-test dummies. They press the limits of permissible speech and thought, they challenge social convention, they test our boundaries, and make us roar when they tell us what we’re really thinking (but dare not say aloud).

The comedic mask allows us the liberty of laughter, without any commitment to deeper subversions. Jokes reveal hypocrisies and incite us to laugh at the nakedness of our emperors—even in front of our emperors. American comedy is a sanctioned release of social and ideological pressure, often in service to more durable authorities.

Comedians are America’s public intellectuals, sure, but they’re also just joking.

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Lewis gives us a fast-moving tale with all the verve you’d expect from the author of Flash Boys and Moneyball. It focuses on how—for a time—two geniuses became joined at the hip.

Kahneman, nervous and self-critical, was a teenager when he fled occupied France with his family during World War II. Settling in Jerusalem before the 1948 war, he was part of the first wave of students to study psychology at the Hebrew University. He conducted psychological research for the Israeli army before heading off to graduate school at UC Berkeley.

Tversky, the child of Russian émigrés, had the self-confidence Kahneman lacked. A dazzling scholar with a mathematical mind, Tversky was also a paratrooper who’d been awarded a medal of bravery by Moshe Dayan, the Israeli general. After completing his military service, Tversky went to the University of Michigan for his Ph.D.

In 1969 Kahneman asked Tversky to speak in a graduate seminar he was leading in Israel. Tversky discussed a line of experimental research he’d learned about in Michigan. Subjects were presented with 20 poker chips, one at a time, said to have been drawn at random from bags containing different mixes of red and blue chips. (Lewis offers a slightly different description of the experimental setup.)

Researchers found that as people were presented with more reds or blues, they gave different estimates of the mix of each bag. If they were presented with a lot of reds, for example, they guessed the bag contained mostly red chips. Their guesses didn’t correspond perfectly with statistical theory—they were more conservative than the chip data warranted—but to the researchers who carried out the experiment, and to a young Amos Tversky, the lesson was that people had an instinctive understanding of probability.

Kahneman wasn’t impressed—and he told Tversky so. He thought it was obvious that if someone sees a lot of red chips, the guess is going to be “mostly red bag.” This isn’t necessarily because the human brain is hard-wired to understand odds. It could just be generalizing from something you’ve observed, with no clue at all as to the underlying mathematics.

Tversky was dumbstruck. Of course Kahneman was right. How had he not seen it before? But if humans don’t grasp odds effortlessly, how do they go about making decisions in situations where it’s important to understand probability, from investors gauging portfolio growth to doctors relying on imaging to make cancer diagnoses?

The answer, the two men came to conclude, is by relying heavily on intuition, perception, and cognitive shortcuts. This often leads to choices that are suboptimal from the perspective of strict rationality. Kahneman and Tversky began an intensely productive collaboration. In paper after paper they explored the errors and biases to which the human mind is prone. Together they laid the groundwork for an intellectual revolution not just in psychology, but also in economics, eventually providing the foundation for the new field of behavioral economics, which uses psychology to help understand economic behavior.

Kahneman and Tversky spent hours huddling together, devising new experiments, writing, being funny. As Lewis describes it, their innovative scholarship was one part the magic of collaborative synergy, one part sheer brilliance, and one part Israeli gumption: Getting human behavior right matters when your country faces existential threat every day.

This makes for a great story. But it left me wondering about the broader social roots of Kahneman and Tversky’s ideas.

You might not think where ideas come from is the purview of sociology. But early thinkers in the social sciences like Karl Marx or Max Weber—the German sociologist best-known for his writings on the Protestant work ethic—recognized that what intellectuals do and say can affect the course of society. Marx argued that intellectuals often develop systems of thought that advance the interests of the economic class they belong to. Weber held that the cultural values of an intellectual’s social group guide the direction of his or her thinking.

Since these early theories, other ways of understanding the social origins of thought have arisen. For example, in a 1998 book the sociologist Randall Collins considered how the social networks of philosophers—who they know—influence their ideas. Collaborators are part of one’s network, but so are teachers, students, colleagues, and confidants.

One of the many philosophers Collins wrote about is Jean-Paul Sartre, who gave us existentialism, the mid-20th-century French philosophy extolling the virtues of authenticity. Sartre belonged to an elite intellectual network in Paris. Collins showed that existentialism took shape as Sartre brought together concepts and ideas that were already floating around in the café-society milieu.

Other sociologists study how ideas spread and make an impact. Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas and Sarah Babb, for instance, published a study in 2002 on why many countries abandoned Keynesian economic policies in the 1970s and 1980s, embracing free market theories and policies in their place.

Looking at developments in Britain, France, Mexico, and Chile, Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb showed that policy makers glommed onto free market ideas partly because they thought deregulation could help their countries weather the economic turbulence of that period. But political reasons also mattered. In Chile, for instance, laissez-faire caught on after the 1973 military coup. General Augusto Pinochet, who wanted to get rid of the last vestiges of socialism, put the nation’s economic policies in the hands of Chilean economists who’d been trained at the University of Chicago, a center of free market thought. Free market thinking also had the backing of Chilean business groups concerned about their bottom line. If it hadn’t been for a complicated mix of economic, political, and cultural factors, these ideas wouldn’t have been able to make headway.

It almost goes without saying that if Lewis had written about Kahneman and Tversky from a sociological point of view, his book wouldn’t have been quite as exciting. Escaping from Nazis, jumping out of airplanes, forming platonic intellectual love affairs, showing up snide, complacent psychologists with pithy remarks—that’s tough stuff for sociological analysis to compete with. But something’s lost when you don’t pay attention to intellectuals’ social environments.

When I was reading The Undoing Project, I kept thinking about how economics became the queen of the social sciences in the post-war period. Scholars in other fields were jealous. Fame awaited anyone who could credibly show that the rationality assumptions at the heart of modern economics were, well, a stretch. (And that you could explain stuff better if you relaxed those assumptions.)

If you look at the all-time most cited social science articles, you’ll see two pieces by Kahneman and Tversky, but also a 1973 article called “The Strength of Weak Ties” by sociologist Mark Granovetter and an article published the same year by economist Oliver Williamson (another Nobel winner) titled “Markets and Hierarchies.” Both articles argued—against economic orthodoxy—that markets just aren’t places where efficiency and unbounded rationality reign supreme.

Around the same time, scholars of law and society were busy showing that law on the books is one thing; law as it’s actually practiced by judges, lawyers, and cops is quite another. And historian Thomas Kuhn had already come out with his famous account of paradigm change—claiming that even in science rationality doesn’t always prevail.

Kahneman and Tversky must have sensed that they’d discovered a potent line of attack against standard economic thinking. Their ideas thus had a lot to do with the state of the intellectual field at the time, the social and academic world they navigated: It provided powerful incentives for their collaborative work, and gave them an opening they seized.

As to why their ideas have gained so much traction recently with policymakers and the public (Kahneman’s 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, was a runaway best-seller), one hypothesis is that knowing something about behavioral economics has become a mark of status in business and political circles. On the heels of wild stock market valuations in the 1990s, the crazy real estate bubble of the early 2000s, and the subsequent crash, conventional economic models haven’t been looking so good.
Behavioral economics is a plausible alternative, and if you devise a new marketing campaign or a set of public policies based on behavioral premises, you’ll look pretty smart.

And there’s a side benefit. If you take the position that markets don’t work perfectly because people are irrational, it gets you out of having to face the possibility that markets don’t work perfectly because markets are inherently exploitative and prone to crisis.

Stories about geniuses with big ideas are fun to read, but they’re not necessarily the whole story. Unless you have a sense for the social context in which ideas develop and spread, it’s impossible to get a proper handle on how much intrinsic value an idea may have versus how much it may seem to have in light of social factors surrounding it.

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More recently, Grant Oliveira, a data analytics consultant with an interest in the origins of philosophical thought, embarked on a project to corral the universe of philosophers that exist on the web, namely via their Wikipedia profiles. That project—which took about two weeks—yielded flawed but promising results.

Looking at these two projects together—one the product of decades of deep gathering of ideas, the other the harvesting of crowd-sourced data—provides some interesting contrasts that in themselves shed light on how ideas are born and perpetuated.

For Collins, his personal networks influenced the project. Early in his career he worked with an Israeli professor, Joseph Ben-David, who was studying the origins of modern science. His mentor explained how the German research universities created the model imitated by England, France, and the U.S.

Collins researched the networks of Islamic thinkers in the 8th through 12th century. Courtesy of Randall Collins.

“I had been a philosophy student before sociology so I was interested in people like Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, and I knew they were connected in a network,” Collins said. “As I read more about it, I realized these were the leaders of the revolution to upgrade the medieval university into a research university. I had also studied the social history of the world religions.

“I went to Zen programs up in the mountains near Los Angeles and found out that the famous Zen Masters were in the same kind of networks too. I made a point of learning Chinese and Japanese history as well as the history of education in Western societies. The networks gave me a gestalt for holding it all together. I traveled to historic sites around the world, and tried to meet the experts in each area. They usually weren’t interested in networks per se. But knowing the key people helped in finding out what they considered the key literature, until I began to feel some closure in the project. That’s why it took me 25 years to do this.”

Collins map of the relationships between philosophers in 11th and 12th century China. Zhu Xi, the philosopher represented by the red dot in the center, is the most influential scholar of the Neo-Confucians.
Courtesy of Randall Collins.

Oliveira used Wikipedia to create an algorithm to identify philosophers, the era that they lived in, and the networks they were part of, including who influenced them and who they influenced. Because some philosophers on Wikipedia may have additional or alternative categories, he acknowledges that this network is not authoritative and has some weaknesses.

An interactive version of Grant Oliveira’s “Philosopher’s Web”. Click the 3 dots on the left to expand. For optimal experience, view on desktop or open a new tab here.

A future update will see the inclusion of other, non-Western philosophers that are categorized differently on Wikipedia. As with all data products, he says, “you should take this with a grain of salt.”

As for his own networks of influence, Oliveira’s academic background is in political science, but the network that influenced him was in data science. He explains: “I got my first grounding from online certificate courses offered by Johns Hopkins taught by Roger Peng, Jeff Leak, and Brian Caffo. They were all influences of mine. I’ve also taken courses by Andrew Ng who worked for Google on machine learning. I follow Gareth James of USC and the rest of the co-authors of An Introduction to Statistical Learning.”

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Q: What did your research on creativity show about the conditions that are necessary for big sticky ideas?

A: I started working on networks of philosophers and mathematicians because those are the intellectual types that go furthest back into world history. Over 25 years, I charted the networks of around 3,000 philosophers and mathematicians in China, India, and ancient Greece as well as modern societies. I traced who was connected to whom and who were rivals in disputes. Also, I ranked them by how eminent they were in the literature.

My main finding was that creativity tends to cluster. The more eminent the thinker, the more eminent people are clustered together. Someone who has a really enormous impact tends to have a lot of important people upstream, as well as having important downstream followers.

What does all this mean? The most important thing people learn from their mentors or teachers is how to ask new questions. Creative thinkers are those who move to an entirely new way of conceiving a question. The questions are more important than the answers. Once a question is posed, new answers become possible.

Q: Did the time that this was happening have any bearing on the eminence of their philosophy?

A: In general, there’s no such thing as a golden age of civilization. An important century for cultural creativity is not necessarily one when your army is conquering other countries or even if it’s a time of prosperity.

What is important is change in the organizational base intellectuals live in. Take Kant and his network—there were half a dozen major philosophers in Germany at that time. This was when universities were reformed from being dominated by theology, to making the philosophical faculty the main field for advanced degrees, and requiring professors to carry out new research. Out of this faculty, most modern research fields developed. Intellectually, the 19th century is the German century. Why? Because they invented the research university. The first generation were philosophical idealists but materialist positions developed in an academic fight to split off a natural science faculty from the philosophical faculty. Internal fights—over creating a new organizational base—open up possibilities and energize people to create new things.

Q: Today we’re electronically networked in every way. Does it follow then that the pace of innovation will speed up, or do you think that the noise of all of the connections gets in the way?

A: It’s more the latter than the former. Ancient philosophers and mathematicians had to meet face to face. You had to be there in Athens or wherever in order to have that network connection. But as printing came in, the network patterns didn’t change. Jean Paul Sartre could have dealt with people in South America by mail, but meetings in cafes were still at the core. The networks around Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were still face to face networks. Even when long-distance media exist, the advantage is in dealing with key people face to face. It is faster as well more intuitive and emotional.

Creative people put a lot of emotional force into their ideas. [Steve] Jobs is a terrific example of that. Einstein and other intellectual heroes tend to be emotionally overpowering and you can’t get that just by reading their writing.

I’ll add one other element: creativity is a competitive process. I coined the term “law of small numbers” for the pattern of famous philosophers and mathematicians. You never get one isolated great thinker at a time; there tend to be two or three as rivals of one another. If the number goes above six or seven, nobody pays attention to the people who come into the network beyond that. It’s as if we can only pay attention to about half a dozen positions at once. Creativity is a struggle to build on the network but to make your own position distinctive so that it attracts followers.

Q: Did a network pick up your idea and run with it?

A: Yes, although in ways that I’ve found a bit surprising. The people who like it the most are network researchers and evolutionary biologists. The people who like it the least are philosophers. (Laughing).

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