Persistence Is The Thing

Persistence is the thing.
Got to get it -- right.
The persistent perseveres.
The perseverer persists.
Persistence. Perseverence!

The Happiness Contagion

Happiness, it seems, is a communal thing. The more people we have around us that are happy, the happier we are; in part on account of their being happy in the first place and in part, yes, because we do, or happen to, know them and to be close to them. Tell that to the "happy native"!


This major re-discovery is brought to our attention by two exciting scholars: Nicholas Christakis (Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, and Department of Sociology, Harvard University) and James Fowler (Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego).

In a longitudinal social network study published in the British Medical Journal on December 4th, 2008, and titled "Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study," the authors report that happiness is contagious and that it spreads dynamically within social networks.

The two authors had sought to "evaluate whether happiness can spread from person to person and whether niches of happiness form within social networks." The specific social network of interest to them was the pre-existing Framingham Heart Study social network, in the state of Massachusetts. The heart study social network has existed since 1948. The authors tracked data on 4,739 participants (or "egos") -- the "offspring cohort" of the participants of the original 1948 study -- for a twenty-year period, running from 1983 to 2003.

But "egos" alone do not a network make. To highlight the dimensions of the network the authors chose to deal with, let us quote them at length:

"Each ego in this cohort is connected to other people via friendship, family, spousal, neighbour, and coworker relationships. Each relationship is a "social tie." Each person who has a relationship with an ego was called an "alter." For example, one ego in the offspring cohort had 18 alters: a mother, a father, a sister, two brothers, three children, two friends, five neighbours, and three coworkers. We wanted to know how each of these alters influences an ego. Many of the alters also happened to be members of a studied cohort in Framingham, which means that we had access to detailed information about them as well. Overall, within the entire Framingham Heart Study social network, composed of both the egos and any detected alters in any Framingham Heart Study cohort, there were 12067 individuals who were connected at some point in 1971-2003."

The study yielded six major findings:

1. That "Clusters of happy and unhappy people" were "visible in the network" and that "the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends)."

2.That being surrounded by many happy people and being "central in the network" make one "more likely to become happy in the future."

3. That, moreover, "clusters of happiness" are precisely the consequence of "the spread of happiness", rather than the symptom of "a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals."

4. That living within a mile (some 1.6km) of a friend who becomes happy increases the probability that one is likewise happy by 25%. The probability increases by 8% among coresident spouses, 14% among siblings who live within 1.6 km of each other, and 34% among next-door neighbours.

5. That this happiness contagion is "not seen between coworkers."

6. That time and geographical separation have a weakening effect on this contagion.


The authors' main conclusion from the study is this:

"People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon."

If happiness is as contagious as that, is it really a stretch to infer that community life is likewise contagious? Might not all this "contagious" (this viral) thinking also lead us to the more fundamental conclusion that humans are social animals not because they are social (they live in social groups) -- that would be a tautology -- but because social life is itself contagious? But in what ways would this contagion be different from Durkheimian solidarity?

Feast of The Immaculate Conception

Today, Catholics the world over celebrate the feast of The Immaculate Conception of Mary mother of Jesus. It is the 532nd such celebration, the first having been presided over by Pope Sixtus IV on December 8th 1476, so long ago. However, historical evidence suggests that the memetic roots of the Immaculate Conception trace back to ninth century England.

As a Catholic, who was once a Sacristan, I must confess that at some point I lost the distinction -- which I suppose we were once as catechists taught, taught when our English was still raw (which is not the same thing as the English in us) and when, perhaps, our attention was raging to be elsewhere -- between the immaculate conception of Mary herself and the virginal birth of her son, and God's son, Jesus Christ the Redeemer. The point being made to us was that she conceived and delivered Him when/while/though she was a virgin, but her own mother had not herself been a virgin.

Over the years I have fused the two notions, forgetting (and presently and belatedly surprised) that we were in our youth asked to believe that Mary herself was born without original sin, essentially taking the immaculate conception to be about the conditions of Jesus' own birth. I totally missed that fine point. No wonder I didn't become the priest my late father, a devout Catholic who must now be in heaven, had dreamt that I, his eldest, would be.

As it turns out, however, I was not alone in this. It is even possible that many and perhaps most Catholics, nowadays, wallow in that confusion. To re-frame Santayana's notion of chaos, that distinction is an "order of thought", a liturgical order, which brings confusion in our minds.

Though her conception was shorn of the "stain" of the original sin, which Adam and Eve committed somewhere here in Africa and perhaps East Africa (if the human-origin narrative of DNA experts is to be tagged to the biblical account of the Garden of Eden and the goings on at the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge), it was the product of sexual intercourse. In contrast, Jesus was conceived as a result of the Word, relayed to Mary by God's own angelic emissary, Gabriel. His was virginal conception, and just as endowed with grace.

When first mooted by Sixtus IV, the concept of the Immaculate Conception was not labelled a dogma of the Church; that is, as something which believers must believe. This left Catholics, who chose to, free to treat it as untrue, without the risk of excommunication on grounds of heresy. It was declared a dogma only in the 19th Century -- more precisely on December 8th, 1854 -- by Pope Pius IX.

That dogma was taught to my parents, both devout; and later to us, but perhaps only in passing. I think the confusion in our minds arose from the fact that we were being asked to believe two very ngumu ("hard"), very counter-intuitive, ideas rolled up essentially into one. A choice was made. And since Mary was not the Daughter of God, nobody went that far, it was easier to take away from her the more poetic and graceful notion of immaculate conception, which was indeed her's, and to attach it to Jesus -- whose own label of "virginal birth" somehow rang too mundane. Perhaps I am projecting a present thought-process into a past in which we thought rather more at face value, rather more intuitively. But perhaps the point here is that the two thought-processes meet at the very same standpoint.

I stop here, for I simply wanted somehow to link this day with a part of my youth, to toss up ideas which continue to puzzle. To learn more about all this, the reader must click here: A History of the Immaculate Conception.