World Fellow Hakan Altinay on how the fellowship turned into Global Civics

A good conversation is an absolute public good, in the way that knowledge is, in the way that justice is, in the way that traffic lights are. But we know who provides the traffic lights. Who provides the conversations?

Hakan Altinay

Hakan Altinay is candid about how he ended up at Yale. A friend nudged him into applying, and he is not sure what he expected.

“The actual experience turned out to be so much richer than what I could fathom when I was applying,” he says. Four months in New Haven turned a hunch he had been carrying into a body of work he calls global civics. It became a book, translated into several languages. It became a documentary, directed by another World Fellow, screened first at Yale and since seen in 110 countries.

Other parts of the program took much longer to surface.

“There are now these time-released vitamins,” he says. “You take the vitamin and not all of them get into your bloodstream right away.” Things planted in 2009 came back years later, when he was building the school he runs today.

“Why is there this much trust in this room?”

His cohort was the first to meet regularly with a psychologist. At the first session, one fellow asked a question that Hakan has been working on ever since. Why was there so much trust among them?

“None of us are naive people, but there was a lot of trust,” he says. They spent two hours on it. Were they being gullible? What exactly had produced this?

The fellow who asked is English and a conservative. Hakan is neither. They have stayed close for years, and Hakan later hosted him at his own school. That pairing is, in a sense, the whole answer.

“The magical dust is creating an environment where all these people, despite their differences, can learn from each other. Not in some cerebral-only mode.”

He points to the etymology of camaraderie, which traces back to the room. “Unless you share the space, the fellowship doesn't come with it.” And then to conscience, which in several European languages carries the sense of knowing together. “What you learn together, you cannot unlearn alone.”

What he took to Istanbul

When Hakan set out to build his own program, he went looking for the specific mechanics rather than the atmosphere.

Both programs are free of charge and generous in what they offer, which he considers instrumental rather than incidental. Both are built around care. “It's a gentle environment,” he says, and that gentleness does real work. “Much of your cognitive bandwidth allocated to normal daily routines is released during the duration of the program, for you to explore something new.”

He calls the result an infrastructure for curiosity. Curiosity, in his view, cannot be preached. It has to be enacted, repeatedly, in conditions that make the leap feel worth taking.

He also copied the feedback habit, including the one to five ratings after sessions. One of his own participants gave him a line he has not let go of since. I thought I knew this, but now I feel it.

That has pushed his school toward what he calls somatic learning, on the theory that understanding is not only a neck-up experience. He reaches for choirs, for chanting at demonstrations, for crowds at football matches. “These are powerful moments of knowing together, and if you pasteurize all this stuff out, you actually have a rather impoverished human experience.”

Too many transactions, not enough conversations

What follows from all this is an argument, and Hakan makes it briskly.

“We know we live in an interdependent world, but we don't know how to generate the trust and goodwill needed for that interdependence not to become a liability, but to be an asset.”

Conversation, he argues, is a badly underused human capacity, and the conditions for it do not appear on their own. Someone has to provide them, the way someone provides the traffic lights. His proposal to policymakers is deliberately concrete. Every young person should have an experience like this every few years, even for a week. Long enough to get to know their compatriots, or in Yale's case, their fellow citizens of the world.

“If we don't know each other, we become suspicious of each other. So the goodwill needs to be actively nurtured.”

Seventeen years of the network

The cohort is still in touch. There is a WhatsApp group, there are reunions, and there are the one-to-one meetings that happen when people pass through each other's cities. Colleagues at the ILC still introduce him to fellows with shared interests, and he says they invariably turn out well.

“When I know someone is a Yale World Fellow, I can already infer a number of very positive things about them,” he says. “It makes starting a new friendship easy, and it makes assuming trust very easy.”

He sees the same effect in his own school, where participants from opposite ends of the political spectrum have gone on to write books together, do research together, and run relief efforts together.

“I feel we tested the hypothesis that encounters of this kind can produce extraordinary reservoirs of trust, despite huge differences. That I find is a very important finding.”

He closes on Confucius, who was asked to name the essentials for a society and gave three. Food, security, and trust. Pressed on which he would keep if he had to give up the other two, he chose trust.

“Because if we have trust, we can resupply the food, resupply security. But if there is no trust, it's doomed.”