Six Degrees of Separation

A friend of a friend of a friend may take you farther than you think. In theory, everyone on Earth is only separated by six degrees of separation. One degree of separation is between you and the people you know. A friend of a friend has two degrees of separation. Carry this on to the sixth degree and you will connect yourself to everyone else on earth. It turns out that social scientists really do think that it’s a small world after all.

The idea began with Hungarian Frigyes Karinthy’s volume of short stories “Everything is Different.” He wrote about “Chain Links” connecting humans into networks. Karinthy wrote that technology was shrinking the world through increased connectedness. Long before Facebook, the Hungarian was thinking about how closely our social networks relate us to one another.

Psychologist Stanley Milgram wrote a formative article on this for “Psychology Today” that told of what was termed the “small world problem.” In that article, he reported on the following experiment in social networks.

Milgram selected random people in Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas. He gave them an explanation of the project with a target person in Boston, Massachusetts. The idea was to pick places in the U.S. that were geographically and socially separate, then see how quickly random people in the two places could connect using persons they know on a first-name basis. Each packet traveled with a list of the previous contacts in the chain.

As random recipients were selected, some did not take part in the experiment, and additional some persons along that network would break the chain, by not sending the packet on to another person. But of the 64 who did take part, the average number of steps was 5.5 to 6 people. Some were as few as two degrees, some as far as ten.

Milgram never used the term “Six Degrees of Separation” but others attached it to the concept. This later morphed into a game called the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where any 1980s star was connected to Kevin Bacon with six movies.

One key point, also made by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “The Tipping Point” is that some particular people create important links and many people in one group will find a lot of their different connections through that one person, who he termed a “connector.”
The main idea is that you are surprisingly connected to others. Here is an example. Let’s say that you know me on a first-name basis. I know my boss Henry Louttit well. He is the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia and he knows several people quite well who know Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams well. Rowan Williams knows well both the Prime Minister and the Queen of England. Hence, if you know me, there are four degrees from you to the Queen of England. Add two more links from the Queen to her friend of a friend list and you have reached six degrees out well across the world.

I was thinking about these six degrees of separation because of an article I read in which Sudanese religious leader Daniel Deng Bul, called on fellow Christians “not to abandon the people of Sudan in this time of danger and uncertainty.” He referred to the inter-tribal fighting, the ongoing conflict in Darfur and renewed rebel atrocities by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). He spoke of Christian churches falling victim to new attacks by the LRA, a Ugandan rebel organization whose soldiers have been involved in widespread massacres and child abductions to create fresh “child soldier” troops.

The problems of Darfur and the rest of the Sudan are the sort of tragedy which feels distant. It is the type of tragedy from which we might even want to distance ourselves as we feel powerless to do anything about it.

I am two degrees of separation from Daniel Deng Bul. He attended Virginia Theological Seminary ahead of my time there. But he was still well known to the faculty I know well, including some like Dr. Ellen Davis who has gone to visit him in the Sudan. The seminary has sent students and faculty to help teach in the Sudanese seminaries.

These people I know well share a love and deep concern for this man and the churches he serves. I can’t avoid the fact that I am two degrees of separation from people in the heart of this international crisis. You may well be only two or three degrees away from this issue as well.

In another sense, all of us are closer to Darfur than we might think. Try this social network: 1) I know Jesus quite well. 2) Jesus knows each person who is suffering in the Sudan. I know. It sounds sappy or silly or even potentially meaningless to write this. Yet it is true. But how does this connection through Jesus to others help or hurt? It’s merely one way of seeing that we are closer to this and other issues than we typically imagine.

Daniel Deng Bul has asked that we not forget them. He wants us to pray. He wants us to ask the international community to stand together in the face of these ongoing crimes against humanity. It’s not too much to ask.

That said, we can’t take all the world’s tragedies on our shoulders. We can’t change the whole world at once. I suggest that you pick you problems. For example, I can take on Darfur and pray for that situation, educate myself and contact others in my social network to effect change.

While I’m working on the Sudan, you can work on praying for the families of those in the air crash in Buffalo, New York. You probably had a friend of a friend of a friend on the flight. We’ll trust others to take on prayer for new situations that arise.

You get the idea. Don’t let the problems of the world overwhelm you. That won’t help anyone. But pick some area where you can use prayer and your own social network to make a difference in the life of someone dealing with tragic circumstances of their own. Don’t be surprised to learn that you were more closely connected than you first thought.

(The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)
 

previous         Return to Religion Column page       next