Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with Berkeley professor of psychology, Dacher Keltner. 12/06/2024
Dacher Keltner is interviewed by Elizabeth Oldfield about counter–cultural upbringings, individualism awe, and the benefits of connecting to something bigger than yourself.
Dacher is a Professor of Psychology and a leading Emotion Scientist. He hosts a podcast and has written the book ‘Awe’, calling us to cultivate lives that are guided by the powerful force of awe.
Introduction: What does fully aliveness mean to you?
Elizabeth
Dacher, I’m going to ask you a question that I think you will probably have given more thought to than almost anyone I could have asked it, which is, what does fully aliveness mean to you?
Dacher Keltner
I think fully aliveness means when you understand and embody and enact relationships to things that are bigger than yourself that you really care about, be it a social movement, or a pattern of affection and family, or a piece of music, or ecosystem around you. I think that fully feeling alive is about just this deep sense of connectedness to the vast forces that make up the world.
Elizabeth
And obviously, one of the things we could say is that it’s sounding very close to your definition of awe. What is the reliable way you can find, to have that sense of connection with something bigger than yourself?
Dacher Keltner
Yeah, you know, it was instructive to do the work on awe, but I think that, being fully alive, feeling alive with purpose and meaning and understanding about why we’re here is bigger than awe. And for me, I really look for moments in the day where I feel it, and it has to do with relating to nature. So, you know, just on my walks to school at Berkeley, I walked by trees that I care about, I look at clouds, I sense the spring bloom. And then I would say secondly, it’s really just relating to the humanity of people. You know, it’s interesting, Elizabeth, early in my career, I learned this system for coding facial musculature. It’s developed by Paul Ekman, and you can code every visible facial muscle movement and configurations of facial muscles. And then I coded more faces than any human being has ever coded, I just became obsessed. And, you know, I learned something about emotion, but what I learned more deeply is, how to look at the face and eyes and sense humanity, and then hear the voice. So, I feel fully alive and connected to large things when, you know, I walked by a preschool, and all the kids are laughing and playing and just becoming alive as human beings. I feel fully alive and connected to larger things, when I see suffering, you know, when I see the suffering of the unhoused, in the United States, 650,000, we have a lot in Berkeley, and I’m like, man, you know, there’s work to do. So, for me, connecting to larger things is really about the natural world, and then humanity, and immersing myself in it.
Elizabeth
And possibly relatedly, I’m always interested in people’s deep values. And often the language I use about this is sacred values. Do you have a sense of your deep guiding principles, the values that you have at least tried to let define your life?
Dacher Keltner
Yeah, I mean, it’s been an interesting period of discovery. I was raised by parents in late 60s and activists and both of them in different ways to the present day, and I kind of sense the overwhelming power of their values of caring about justice for, civil rights and African Americans. And I would say, one is caring. I remember 22 years ago or so being on a panel with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and I was interested in Buddhism, Daoism and Eastern thought, like a lot of people. And just hearing, you know, he’s like, the fundamental commitment is compassion, is care. And that, and then I did a lot of research on compassion, it’s evolutionary history, how it affects our nervous systems, how if you can stay close to that, you’ll navigate most situations pretty well. And I felt that in my upbringing, too, you know, just tracing it back to my parents. Then more recently, in particular doing a lot of work for people in prison, the formerly incarcerated. The American justice system is brutal, and racist in many ways and, and unfair, and that just an awakened something in me. I think a lot of people will feel this core value through their life, and then something that awakens in the middle of life. And it was justice that really awakened me in the past twelve to fifteen years. So, I’d say those two.
Elizabeth
That’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because there’s quite a lot of thinking in the last few years in terms of this midlife turn. You know, David Brooks calls it the second mountain, that kind of shift from achievement to purpose. And I hadn’t really thought that there are these clarifying moments for our values aren’t there. These moments of moral profundity when we have a kid, or we get a bad diagnosis, or we have a brush mortality.
Dacher Keltner
Well, it’s amplified with my brother getting sick. I mean, that was a really deep experience because, I was an older brother to Rolf, my younger brother, who was one year younger, we just were so close and did a lot together. And in many ways, he was more of my moral compass. You know, he taught really poor kids how to talk and you know he was just this very principled guy. And, when he passed away, I lost my mooring, or my bearings. And it was this period of like, man, what do I really care about? What should animate my life? So yeah, it was also that event that brought me to caring and injustice.
Elizabeth
Thank you. Well, we’re going to come back to that, but I want to just hear a little bit more about your childhood, if that’s okay? And unpacking what those principles that your parents held meant for how you lived. Paint me a picture of you and your brother, and your life, maybe in primary school years.
Dacher Keltner
Yeah, thank you, Elizabeth. You know, when you suffer a trauma, like a beloved brother passes away, and when your parents get older – my parents are both 86, that’s old! I think that the combination of those two things made me think, man, this little family I grew up in is, not vanishing, but it’s transforming – my brother’s gone, etc. So, I thought a lot about my childhood and family. And I guess the way to summarise it is, I think we were an experiment in alternative culture! I was born in Mexico in a little clinic in 1961, which is unusual, as was my brother. And then, we moved to Southern California until I was 10. My Dad’s an artist, my mom was getting a PhD at UCLA to teach romanticism and poetry in Virginia Woolf. So, I was raised in the arts, although I was more science oriented. And I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and I think I was part of a counterculture, you know, everything that my family did in my childhood was almost the antithesis of sort of standard culture. My mom became the primary breadwinner, my dad was a visual artist critiquing society. You know, my brother and I had really long hair in a place where no one had long hair. We, moved in when I was 10 years old, to a poor rural town, which was very conservative where Trump voters would arise today. My parents were super lefty, they represented George McGovern. And a lot of people feel this way like, my life is about being a counterpoint to prevailing culture.
And then I would say, what my childhood was like, was full of wonder. It was free. My brother and I skateboarded around the Laurel Canyon Hills, people were doing crazy things, we were watching these adults take drugs and, you know, doing alternative things. And we were like, wow, look at society! When we moved to the country, in the foothills of the Sierras when I was when I was 10, we wandered, and we went to rivers, and we swam, and we didn’t do homework. It was just pretty unconstrained, and wild, and unconventional. And to be honest, you know, I look at the mental health crisis today and young people, and I’m like so grateful that I had that freeform childhood.
Communal Living and Culture Clashes
Elizabeth
I’m not sure if you’ve addressed this directly, but from various things you said, I got the impression that you’ve maybe lived in a more sort of communitarian or collaborative setup for parts of that period. Is that right?
Dacher Keltner
I think, you know, it’s hard to do in the United States, because we were so confined to like, ‘we all live in our individual homes.’ But yeah, there was definitely this spirit that I was a child of, the discourse around the women’s movement, and, you know, empowered women, and my mom was a very empowered woman. I was a child in the late 60s of the sexual revolution. And you know, you couldn’t help but going to parties of adults and sensing like, things are changing. I was a child of just a really different view of drugs, you know, which cost a lot of kids. I mean, it was hard on kids, I am not very oriented in that way. So, I saw political marches that you felt that, as young people feel today right now in the United States with the attacks on Palestine, that things were in revolution. And we didn’t live on a commune. I saw communes, it felt communal. It just felt like a communitarian spirit, to use your word, which is interesting.
Elizabeth
I should kind of confess my personal thing by the question is that we live in a small intentional community is the jargon.
Dachner Keltner
You’re lucky.
Elizabeth
Yeah, we’re raising our kids in a slightly different way from mainstream society. And ours is influenced more by the kind of monastic heritage, and that kind of expression of more communal ways of living than the counterculture one, although these all kind of learn from each other and feed into each other. I’m also always very interested in dominant cultural stories, and the dominant cultural stories about growing up in a counterculture, or growing up in a community, or growing up in a sect, tends to be that you hear the stories of the people who had a terrible time, and it’s a high–risk environment. So, reading about your sort of really quite happy sounding childhood, outside the mainstream was quite encouraging for me!
Dacher Keltner
Well, no. And I have to say, Elizabeth, I mean, I agree totally. I remember reading Ruth Rosen, feminist scholar writing about the late 60s counterculture. And she’s like, it ended up reproducing the old patterns. Men love the sexual revolution, and sexual freedom, you know, and women did all the work, yet again and I sense that. And yeah, I will tell you, and I think a lot about it, like, I think it was my age. In the wildest place, I was eight, and nine, right? And so as an observer, like a lot, eight, nine year olds, they’re smart, they’re like, look at what people are doing. But I was not fourteen or fifteen, and some of the kids who I was around in the Hollywood Hills in Laurel Canyon, where Rock n Roll was exploding, and drugs. Those fourteen/fifteen–year–olds, they got into serious trouble, and they did not recover. So yeah, I hear you. I think I got lucky. And that’s why I call it an experiment, had I been fifteen, I may have been a heroin addict, and you know, trying to be rock and roller. It was a risky thing.
Elizabeth
And then when you picked up and put in a very different environment, Wikipedia says “a conservative town (citation needed)” but you have alluded to it too. How do you think that formed you, that experience of being part of a counterculture collectively with other people and then suddenly being the only ones living by a different set of values?
Dacher Keltner
Yeah, I have to tell, its mind blowing. My mom got a job at Sacramento State University to teach as a professor. And we moved, like a lot of kind of counterculture people did, to the country. We got five acres, and we moved to this really poor rural town at the time, because that’s what we could afford, we didn’t have much money. And the whole rural thing was a disaster, we didn’t get that tractor running and the earth didn’t produce good gardens, etc. But, but socio–culturally, it was astonishing. And I remember, my brother and I arrived with long hair from LA, and no one had long hair, and the rage around gender stuff was astonishing. I remember going to one of the first days of school and I had a Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s patch on my shirt, and kids are like, who are the Beatles? You know, I was like, whoa. In seventh grade, and this is not a joke, our class was on the Civil War. I represented the north in the debate, and somebody else represented the south promoting slavery. And my teacher who was from Tennessee, declared the South the winner!
Elizabeth
Wow.
Dacher Keltner
So it was, you know, it was a racist, poor but very kind people, but they were in that American ideology. And it taught me to be able to adapt. It taught me to see the underlying humanity of people, you know, this guy, you know, this guy might say racist things but, in many ways, he means well, right. And he’s trying his best. And I think we’ve lost sight of that lesson in the United States. And then most importantly, Elizabeth, and I wrote about this in the power paradox. It taught me, how devastating poverty is for the psyche, you know, one in five children in the United States is impoverished. They’re hungry. And some of the kids that I grew up around were like that, a lot of the kids. And I started to see, and now we know that socio–scientifically that, when you don’t have rich educational programmes, there aren’t wonderful parks, etc., those kids are harmed by that. And I now look back on my past, and I see young, promising kids who didn’t get a shot because of poverty. And the US has been blind to social class and inequality. England got to it earlier, and we’re starting to understand it, and I felt that viscerally in my childhood.
Elizabeth
How would you describe Dacher in his teenage years? What words would you use?
Dacher Keltner
Oh, my God! You know, it’s interesting. There’s a layer to my identity that is anxious, it just runs in my family, I had four years have panic attacks. So, I look at my early teen years, and I’m like, I never wanted to go to the big party, etc. I think I’m embarrassed, I think I was slightly misanthropic and grouchy, and kind of snarky. And I regret that, I think I’ve learned how to sort of deal with those demons, if you will. I didn’t go to a very good high school, it didn’t offer a lot for creative kids, so I had good reason to be snarky. I think I was liberated by my brother, who was bolder and more interesting. And then my best friend at the time, Guillermo, who was wild and was always pushing me and taught me to be more courageous, so that was good. And then I had a fantasy, probably generated by my mom, who did get a novel published that I’d be a novelist. And it turns out I wasn’t a very good writer. So, I was pretty adrift, it took me a while to find my way.
Elizabeth
We always do this post hoc rationalisation, right? But if it feels obvious to me that, given your childhood, you would study psychology and sociology to try and work out how humans tick. Was that just an obvious path that opened up before you?
Dacher Keltner
Well, you know it is. I think the outsider would say yes. I mean, I do feel if I had real talents in the arts or writing fiction, that’s what I would have tried to do. But I don’t think I really was meant to do that. But I was good at math and science. And, you know, Elizabeth, now 45 years later, from when I was 17, I was lucky. My mom was handing me books by D.H. Lawrence and Jung, right. And my dad was getting me to think about Lao Tzu, who really was foundational to my early thinking about the spirit, and the sacred, and the soul. And I just dug into that realm. And then I had this talent for psychological science, although a lot of it isn’t really oriented towards these questions, it gave me kind of this broad sense of, wow! If you could study collective mind, what an amazing thing to study. And then, you know, some people would write about it with literature, I couldn’t do that. But I was like, could I just think about scientific study or statistics could help us do that. So I think in some ways, my parents set me on a path really well, they gave me big questions to think about and a direction.
Academia And Finding Your Tribe
Elizabeth
This is really helping me join some of the dots because I sort of immerse myself in someone before I talked to them and there’s often things that I’m puzzling over. And with you, it’s been how unlike an academic you seem.
Dacher Keltner
I know!
Elizabeth Oldfield
Because I think a lot about formation, which is this Jesuit concept. But it basically just means that who we’re becoming, and who we’re becoming is such a product of the relationships we’re in, and the forms of attention that we apply, and the sort of repeated habits and rituals. The classic phrase is, “No formation without repetition.” We can talk more about this, because, getting into work, there’s so much I want to talk to you about. But the formation of academia and the sciences, of which I have many people who are dear in my life who have gone through that, but they read differently from you and sound different from you. And so, yeah, I’d just love you to say a bit more about that. Have you felt like a bit of an outsider or an anomaly in some of the tribes you found yourself in professionally?
Dacher Keltner
Yeah, I don’t think I ever have found a tribe. You know, I do feel like an outsider in the fields I’m in even though our science has helped start various subfields. Yeah, I think my parents taught me to, and this is the spirit of the late 60s, to watch out for institutions and distrust them and especially authority figures. Like, you know, both my parents struggle with authority figures, and they were an artist and a literature professor. And you know, when I get into systems, I look at them and I’m like, Oh there’s the bureaucratic structure. There’s the person who’s the president and talking like the president, and all these roles they play, and I just wasn’t raised like that. I was raised in the spirit of romanticism in many ways, like, follow passion, follow curiosity, follow awe. And so that’s always been true of me, you know. And then, with respect to science, it’s interesting, I was talking with Michael Pollan about his forthcoming book on consciousness, and how, in some ways, the humanities do a better job of the deeper questions like consciousness, spirit, awe, if you will. But I’m in a scientific tradition, and that’s what I was good at. And so I’ve always gotten my hypotheses, and ideas of phenomena from literature, and paintings, and music, and humanities. I was raised in that way and so I’m sort of a translator of the humanities, in a way, that makes me weird, right? I study weird things. And then regrettably, I don’t look like a scientist. I look like a surfer, but I don’t surf! And I don’t talk like a scientist, I can’t help it. You know, and I love Iggy Pop, you know, beat poetry and that’s what I got.
Elizabeth
Yeah it’s clearly part of the reason that so many people are able to kind of hear the findings that you’re bringing from your field, externally. The other thing I wanted to ask that, bearing in mind I am married to a philosopher who I adore, but one of my bugbears with philosophy is it’s supposed to be love of wisdom, right? But I don’t know if you’ve seen The Good Place, but there’s this running joke on The Good Place, a Netflix sitcom about the afterlife, that you might quite like, where there’s an ethics professor. And there’s this running joke that everyone hates ethics professors, because they’re terrible people. My instinct is, there’s a lot of people that study the good life, you know. I have a friend who’s an anthropologist, and someone invited him to a big religious ritual, and they said, “Don’t come as an anthropologist come as a person.” Like how easy it is, when we study something, to maintain analytical distance, and write about it, but never apply it to our own lives. Have you found that risk? How have you overcome it? Tell me a bit about that.
Dacher Keltner
Oh, yeah, I’ve taught the science of happiness for 25 years to, tens of thousands of people now, and some of the lessons of happiness I struggle with. There’s a lot of anxiety in my family, I had four or five years where I had more panic attacks than have been experienced by the average auditorium of 200 people. So, the idea of just like, savouring the joy of today and feeling grateful for everything, it was hard one for me to apply those lessons, some of the classic lessons of happiness. And then I got to awe you know, and meaning, and I think the happiness literature, and thanks to people like you, are looking deeper. Like, what’s beyond pleasure? What’s beyond the healthy romantic partnership? What is awe about? What’s meaning about? What’s the transcendent? And when I got to that, that’s why I had to study it, Elizabeth. I am a child of awe; my parents were giving it to me. And I had these tools, my colleagues kind of laughed at me, but this one felt like it spoke to me with ease personally. But like one of the big first stories in The Science of Happiness, was just be optimistic, and I’m hopeful and I love human beings, but I look at what’s happening. And it’s like, ‘Oh, let’s be optimistic about American politics.’ Come on! Give me a break. So, I struggled in applying it and that was ironic, to get in front of a class and say these keys to happiness. But and now I tell my class, like, yeah, I come from an anxious genotype, and I’ve had more anxiety than most of you and it’s okay. We can find our way in it. But getting to awe, and meaning, and narrative, and art has been a transition in being able to apply it readily, what I learned in the lab.
Awe: Beyond addiction and the individual
Elizabeth
Okay, well, I want to finish by talking about religion as a way of structuring this awe thing. But first, let’s stay with it for a bit longer because I want to hear, what is it? How do you define it?
Dacher Keltner
Yeah, you know, awe, we have a lot of research now that says there are about 20 distinct emotions that shape how we perceive the world, and relate to people, and construct our cultural realities and awe is one of those 20 emotions. It’s a brief feeling you have when you encounter things that are vast or beyond your frame of reference, right? “Oh my God, look at the colours in the sky, or these leaves fluttering in the wind?” Or, you know, the magnificence of Jane Goodall’s, kindness and insight. And then awe is mysterious, you can’t make sense of it immediately. Like, what is this? What is this painting about? I don’t get it. So, awe is a feeling we have when we encounter vast mysteries. And then a lot of our research suggests it unfolds in this wonderful way where we feel humble, and open, and small, and connected to vast things, which is where we began our conversation. I remember, in writing the book, feeling awe suddenly in a moment, at this experience of a symphony, which I was struggling to understand. And it suddenly made me realise that the symphony was about, this vast theme in life of subjugation and encountering vast forces that are beyond us. And I had this powerful feeling like, wow, I’m relating to this idea of music. So, awe is an emotion that helps us connect to the vast forces of life.
Elizabeth
It’s making me think, bearing in mind do not quote Kant very often! But the only bit of Kant that I’ve ever really read is his kind of aesthetics, and the concept of the sublime. And I remember struggling to understand what he’s saying, and getting the sense that the sublime is kind of yourself reaching up to understand, and then sort of falling back on yourself, because you can’t, and it’s quite scary, right? It’s quite destabilising of your sense of self. Is that in there, too?
Dacher Keltner
It is. I mean, what we know is we navigate the world through the lens of, what I call the default self, like, what are my goals here? Am I satisfying my needs? Am I rising in status? Classic self–ego concerns. And then there are these realms of the imagination, where we suddenly understand we’re part of something larger, right? We’re part of a cultural tradition that transcends itself, we’re part of evolution, in my view, or meaning in music and awe connects the self to those large things. And yeah, we’re always oscillating between being part of something transcendent, ‘Wow, I’m part of a political movement. It’s so thrilling.’ And then ‘Oh, I have this individual self I have to take care of, and it is destabilising very often.’
Elizabeth
Yeah, ‘unselfing’, is what Iris Murdoch calls it. I really loved your book, and the thing that really stuck with me was, you know, we get awe in music, and the arts, and creativity, all these things that I sort of expected, and in nature. But most commonly, actually, in interactions with other human beings, and particularly in moments of you use this phrase, ‘moral beauty’. And I’d love you to say a bit more about that. Because clearly, a lot of the time you’re referencing evolutionary forces, and my kind of mother tongue dominant frame is theology. And so, when I think of moral beauty, I think, “No greater lover than this, that they would lay down their life or their friends”, you know, that kenotic self–emptying love that is so part of the story of my tradition. How do we explain those moments of moral beauty within an evolutionary frame? Do we even need to? Just help me understand a bit more about what those mean to you.
Dacher Keltner
Yeah. What a wonderful frame for the question, Elizabeth. And your quote, gave me chills, which is a moment of moral beauty, the idea that we lay down our lives for friends. And yeah, you know, it surprised me too. You know, we studied 26 different countries, or cultures, radically different cultures, from Mexico to India to China. We asked them to write stories of awe and the most common story was moral beauty. When we are awestruck, and we tear up and we get lumps in our throat, and we get the chills in encountering people’s courage, and kindness, and overcoming. You know, I see the protesters on college campuses today, and I’m filled with moral beauty that they are introducing a new political concern for our times. People are overwhelmed by people’s capacity for selflessness. And it’s descriptively true, a lot of people have written about this from David Hume to Immanuel Kant, to the great ethical traditions. I was just talking to NASA scientists, and I asked people to give stories of moral beauty. And this space scientist said, you know, he volunteers in prisons as part of his religious tradition. And this religious leader went in, he had Parkinson’s, and as part of the ritual, he would wash prisoners’ feet. And we all started weeping, in the spirit of Jesus, like, wow! Think of what humans do. And it’s everywhere, despite our cynical times, in many ways. And why we need that evolutionarily is, there’s new philosophy around this, suggesting the deepest way we find our moral compass is through moral beauty. By hearing that story of washing your prisoners’ feet, I walk out of there, like, I’ve got to care for people who don’t get the breaks I got, period. That’s a moral principle I need to live by which I want to. And I learned it not from a text or deep analytical study, I learned it in the reverence for human beings. And I think, man, do we need that right now. 40% of American kids can’t name a role model, you know, they can’t say, I love Malala or Mother Teresa, you know, or, LeBron James, when he speaks on behalf of Black Lives Matter. It’s so powerful, it’s the way we learn how to be moral beings, which as hyper–social species, are fundamentally needed to get our children to the age of viability. So it’s foundational to our culture.
Elizabeth
Yeah, it’s so interesting, how much everything comes back to relationship and connection. I want to put a theory to you, which is entirely untested and completely intuitive on my part. And it is, in this series we’re theming around the book I have coming up called Fully Alive. And the chapters are very loosely framed around the seven deadly sins as a way of thinking about disconnection, which is my definition of sin. We disconnect from our own souls, our own selves, from each other, from the gift of the created world, and obviously, in its most common understanding from Divine love. And in my chapter on gluttony, I spend the first hour thinking about addiction, and addictive and numbing behaviours, and the way we disconnect from ourselves by distracting, numbing, not listening to the things we really want. Which is usually comfort, and to be affirmed, and to be in intimate relationships with other people, and to feel safe, and to feel known. You know, these deep relational needs, we just stuff from down with them scrolling, or online shopping, or booze, or food or whatever it is. And I have a very deep love of The Recovery Movement and the wisdom that is in there. But their answer to a lot of that is sobriety, which I’m like yes, and awe. Like something about ecstasy, the transcendence, these moments of unselfing. I have a kind of very strange, charismatic, Christian Pentecostal practice, that still feels very important, a very life giving to me. But I realised as I was making this argument in the book, that I do not know the field at all. Well, to know if this is something that feels like it’s just true in my life, or whether there might be a broader experience. I don’t know if that makes sense.
Dacher Keltner
Yeah, if I understand you correctly, Elizabeth, I think this is a profoundly important hypothesis you’re offering that, you know, the key to dealing with things like addiction, which is widespread in the United States.
Elizabeth
And I mean, that in a very broad way, something we’re all complicit and caught up in.
Dacher Keltner
Yeah, overeating and drinking too much alcohol, you know, smoking, etc. Those are hard habits to kick, really hard. And then you might even add, trauma, like the hijacking of the mind by trauma, and maybe the pathway to healing is through awe and transcendence. And that’s been sort of an animating idea in our lab, and we’ve published work on this, that awe is good. We took veterans rafting for half day, and they had a 32% drop in PTSD symptoms for a week. That’s powerful, to do half a day is something to take a third of PTSD away from someone. And so, I think it’s a cutting–edge hypothesis, that maybe what we should be orienting therapies toward, addiction approaches toward, trauma treatment toward is getting people to find the vast things that are connected their connectedness, like you said. And that’s such a radically different view of the typical Western European view of like addiction is dopamine malfunction in the brain. Depression is a serotonin malfunction. We now know that’s not true. So, I think we got to be looking to this deeper, connectedness that you’re talking about, I hope the work lives up to your thinking.
Elizabeth
Yeah, it was just through talking through a lot of people. I had a lovely conversation with Nick Cave. He talks about the similarity between the thing he was looking for in his heroin addiction, and the thing that he’s interested in church is depth is. William James calls it ‘the more’ and, it’s right there in the recovery stuff, right? Jung was writing about it early on about the God; however you understand them or whether it’s removable or not, and he talked about Spiritus Contra Spiritum, the Latin for alcohol and the Latin for spirit are the same word, essentially. And that we need spirit to in order to sate the craving for vodka. It’s a hard thing in a culture that doesn’t know how to talk about spirit, and is scared of spirituality, and for some good reasons, very cautious about religion. To say actually, it’s a metaphysical yearning that you’re trying to sate, with consumerism, or workaholism, or an eating disorder, or whatever it is.
Dacher Keltner
I’m embarrassed, I haven’t thought about this as much, you’re offering a really deep scientific idea in the social sciences.
Elizabeth Oldfield
No one’s ever said that to me before!
Dacher Keltner
Well in the social sciences, we’re reconceptualising what needs humans have and so their first was a paper on the need to connect and belong. And then my collaborator, Cameron Anderson said, we have a need for status and respect. William James – the deepest urge we have is to be appreciated. And you’re pushing it and saying, we have a need for connecting to the transcendent, to spirit or, you know, transcendent music, etc. And I agree, I think that, for me, human evolution built into us this capacity to connect the individual self to large systems out in the world, an ecosystem, a cultural system, a family system, a spiritual system. And that probably neurophysiologically has the structure and function of need which is, I hunger for this, it involves, the vagus nerve and oxytocin and a lot of neurophysiological systems that, when satisfied, feels fulfilling. And I think today, when I look at young people and hear about the meaning crisis, and the mental health crisis, to me, it’s that they’re not connecting to larger things to guide their lives, what some people would call spirit or soul.
Integrating religious values into a ‘de–churching’ society
Elizabeth
Yeah, I think it was originally at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy, self–transcendence. And that often gets translated in the literature without it. And he has very interesting things to say about religion and ecstatic experiences and what they mean. But anyway, I won’t go into that. Anyway, I want to land with that question really about how we create the structures for these things. And one of the cases that I’m making in the book is, I am both a Christian in the sense that I believe it right. It is not just an instrumental exercise, for me, I think there’s truth in that. And I have also, having been in it, and then out of it, and then in it again, have come to see the sort of deep psychological insight that being part of a religious tradition (in the healthy forms, huge caveat) can bring us. That insights like how we need awe, and you’ve written also about compassion, and I didn’t get to talk to you about The Power Principle and this amazing thing about the more power and privilege that we have, actually, the harder it is to sustain a healthy character. And I write about that, there’s something going on about the way money works, and power, and relationship, and the need for interdependence, and power and privilege takes you away from interdependence and you cannot be fully human, if you’re not interdependent. I’ve basically landed right back in. I don’t know how you do it without religion. I don’t know how you do it without communal, robust ritualised, imaginatively embodied spiritual pathways. Yeah. But religion could also be the worst thing in the world when it goes wrong. Talk to me about that.
Dacher Keltner
Yeah, you know, religion makes people happier, religion makes people healthier, religion makes people less vulnerable to major episodes of depression, those are robust empirical findings. And then you have this, as the Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and others have observed twenty years ago, religion leads to wars and you know, it’s causing turmoil on our college campuses here. So, it’s a complicated thing, it’s part of our human history. And what I’m interested in as a psychologist is, young people around the world are moving away from religion, its attendance is plummeting, Nicholas Kristof, of The New York Times called it the ‘de–churching’ of the United States, that’s true. And then at the same time, the people are creating paths, spiritual paths, through alternative means, they are meditating like never before, yoga studios, etc. So, what I have pursued both personally, I’m not a religious person, and then in my teachings of a ‘de–churching’ population is find what’s great about religions and build it into your life. Find your rituals, find your ways of having, you know, periods of quiet and reflection, find your pilgrimages, find the music that is sacred to you, find the iconography that matters to you. You know, for me, it’s posters of Iggy Pop! You know, so, we can rebuild with all of those elements of religion. I am a deep fan of Nick Cave and admire him and glad to hear his name. So yeah, that’s what we have to do. We have a meaning crisis in young people, in some sense. It probably tracks the abandonment of formal religion. So, let’s recreate it and see where it goes, which is what’s happening. And I think we just need to be more intentional about it.
Elizabeth
Yes. I have various friends who tried to set up non–religious alternatives, The Sunday Assembly, was one of them. Great experiment called Nearness and I’ve been sort of in advisory capacities to some of those and cheerleading them. But the bit that I think no one’s quite worked out yet, is the communal container that holds people together over time.
Dacher Keltner
I agree.
Elizabeth Oldfield
And, you talk about connection and relationship and interdependence. When we have been formed by a society that say, you are an individual and individualise your spirituality that can actually get us quite a way, and it’s better and it helps. But my open question is, what are the forms of collective and how do people covenant together over time? Because that’s how we change.
Dacher Keltner
I agree. I think it’s the greatest failure of individualism, you know, this cultural form that’s so prominent outside of our exploitation and disconnected nature is we broke ties between people. And that’s robustly documented in the social sciences and we’re suffering, you know, loneliness is a disease in some ways. And it’s structurally hard to build those and that sense of enduring community. That’s the real challenge of this. You know, we can find our rituals, we can meditate, etc. But the community is the deep problem that we’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s really in peril.
Elizabeth
Dacher Keltner, I could talk to you for another hour. But I want to thank you very sincerely for your time talking to me for this special Fully Alive series of The Sacred.
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