Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life

by Dacher Keltner

  Lost in the controversy of this study is another finding: The most important criterion for females and males alike in their search for love, an overwhelming universal across the thirty-seven countries surveyed, is kindness. There are many clear benefits to mating with caretaking individuals, the vagal superstars of our world. They are likely to devote more resources to offspring. They are more likely to provide physical care—touch, protection, play, affection—and create cooperative, caring communities vital to survival. They are more likely to raise offspring that themselves do well in the mating game when they reach the age of reproduction. And presumably, they should be less likely to run off with the next cute thing. The sexual preference for kind individuals makes evolutionary sense, as Darwin long ago surmised: “Sympathy…will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities which include the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”

  Evolution went one step further. Social selection pressures—who we favor with friendships, attention, and status in groups—created additional pressure for kindness to be wired into our genes. We only survive socially, in groups, and groups fare better when comprised of kind individuals. In my research, we have asked individuals in different groups to talk in free form about the reputations of randomly selected group members. We provided an opportunity for sorority sisters to gossip about each other by simply asking them to tell nicknames of other sorority sisters not present and what kinds of activities justified those nicknames. The central issue in this kind of reputational discourse was not what you might think—the group member’s tendency to drink too much or take illegal drugs, or irritating idiosyncracies (the tendency to play the drums at 2:00 AM, to not do the dishes, or to leave dirty socks or underwear out for all to view and smell). Instead, the central focus of reputational discourse is the kindness and warmth of other group members. Off-the-record chat, banter, and gossip all center upon who lacks kindness and compassion and poses a threat to the harmony of the group. We ferret out cold, self-interested, backstabbing Machiavellians through reputational processes—gossip, casual conversations about the latest things other group members have done.

  In fact, so important was the capacity to care to the survival of our species that new data suggest that we have been wired to identify the trustworthy and reliable caretakers among us, and preferentially trust, and give resources to, those vagal superstars. In a study that explored this reasoning, participants played the trust game with a set of vagal superstars and a set of low-vagal-tone individuals, whom we’ll call Machiavellians. These participants first viewed each vagal superstar or Machiavellian for twenty seconds on videotape in a conversation with another person. The sound was off. The cues our vagal superstars and Machiavellians were giving off were minimal (a few head nods, an open-handed posture, a gleam in the eye). The task for our participants was to indicate how much they trusted each vagal superstar or Machiavellian. They then gave some amount of money to each vagal superstar and Machiavellian, which would be sent to that person over the Internet and tripled. That individual on videotape would then give some amount back to our participants.

  As in life, the task for our new participants was to trust the right people. Gifts to the more cooperative vagal superstars would more likely be returned in kind. Avoiding generosity toward the Machiavellians would prevent the participants from being exploited by these competitive types. And indeed, our new participants trusted the vagal superstars more. They also gave them more money. The branches of the nervous system that support compassion and altruism are detected and rewarded in brief encounters with strangers. It pays to be kind.

  SYMPATHY BREAKTHROUGH

  When asked what unites the ethics of the world’s religions, scholar Karen Armstrong responded with the simplest of answers: “compassion.” If faced with their own version of the question—What is the central moral adaptation produced in the evolution of human sociality?—evolutionists would converge on a similar answer: “compassion.” On this, the religiously inclined and evolutionists would agree.

  The centrality of compassion to cooperative, high jen communities makes it a ready, and necessary, target of attack by those with contrasting visions of human social life. Hitler knew that compassion—sympathy breakthroughs—could undermine his master plan:

  My pedagogy is hard. What is weak must be hammered away. In my fortresses of the Teutonic Order a young generation will grow up before which the world will tremble. I want the young to be violent, domineering, undismayed, cruel. The young must be all these things. They must be able to bear pain. There must be nothing weak or gentle about them. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from their eyes.

  Early practices of Hitler’s SS—shooting women and children in face-to-face encounters—led to drinking, depression, and desertion. As a result, the training of the SS officers shifted, in ways that hammered out of the soul all that was gentle, leaving only that flash in the eyes of the predator. SS officers were ordered to use Jews for target practice. Some SS officers were asked to kill their pets with their own hands. Jews were dehumanized, treated as animals in cattle cars, made to defecate in public, and used in scientific experiments on the limits of pain.

  Today, we are engaged in a more subtle struggle over compassion. It is not found in a demagogue’s ideology or Fascist’s social engineering but in the content of our culture. Violent video games, ad-filled Internet sites, and the new digital world of “weak ties” all diminish the face-to-face and skin-to-skin basis of compassion. This struggle is likely shaping the nervous systems of our children, perhaps in permanent ways. Recent neuroscientific evidence suggests that the regions of the brain that enable compassion—portions of the frontal lobes involved in empathy and perspective taking—continue to develop into the twenties. Compassion can be cultivated.

  When Richie Davidson scanned the brain of a Tibetan monk, he found it to be off the charts in terms of its resting activation in the left frontal lobes. This region of the brain supports compassion-related action, feeling, and ideation. After years of devotion and discipline, his was a different brain, humming with compassion-related neural communication.

  Okay, you’re rightfully critiquing, whose resting brain state wouldn’t shift to the left if you had the time and steadfastness to meditate for four to five hours a day upon loving kindness, as Tibetan Buddhists do? Fair enough. When Richie and Jon Kabat-Zinn and colleagues had software engineers train in the techniques of mindfulness meditation—an accepting awareness of the mind, loving kindness toward others—six weeks later these individuals showed increased activation in the left frontal lobes. They also showed enhanced immune function. They may not have been donning the saffron robes of the monk, but at least their minds were moving in that kind direction.

  Recent scientific studies are identifying the kinds of environments that cultivate compassion. This moral emotion is cultivated in environments where parents are responsive, and play, and touch their children. So does an empathic style that prompts the child to reason about harm. So do chores, as well as the presence of grandparents. Making compassion a motif in dinnertime conversations and bedtime stories cultivates this all-important emotion. Even visually presented concepts like “hug” and “love” at speeds so fast participants couldn’t report what they had seen increase compassion and generosity.

  Compassion is that powerful an idea. It is a strong emotion, attuned to those in need. It is a progenitor of courageous acts. It is wired into our nervous systems and encoded in our genes. It is good for your children, your health, and, recent studies suggest, it is vital to your marriage. In the words of the Dalai Lama: “If you want to be happy, practice compassion; if you want others to be happy, practice compassion.” It has taken a sympathy breakthrough for science to catch up to this wisdom of the ages. Ironically enough, compassion may be a prerequisite to the pursuit of self-interested happiness.

  12

  Awe />
  ONE AFTERNOON in a botany class at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, John Muir heard a fellow student explain how the flower of an enormous black locust tree is a member of the pea family. That the giant black locust tree and the frail pea plant, so remote in size, form, and apparent design, shared an evolutionary history astounded Muir. He later wrote: “This fine lesson charmed me and sent me flying to the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm.”

  Shortly thereafter, Muir left college. He walked 1,000 miles on a naturalist’s pilgrimage to Florida. He then moved west, to California, and in the summer of 1869, at the age of twenty, herded a couple hundred sheep through the Sierra Nevada Mountains on a trail that wound its way to Yosemite. During this trip he kept a small diary attached to his leather belt. He wrote almost daily entries about these first experiences, which eventually were published as My First Summer in the Sierras. A few days into this trip, Muir writes:

  June 5

  a magnificent section of the Merced Valley at what is called Horseshoe Bend came full in sight—a glorious wilderness that seemed to be calling with a thousand songful voices. Bold, down-sweeping slopes, feathered with pines and clumps of manzanita with sunny, open spaces between them, make up most of the foreground; the middle and background present fold beyond fold of finely modeled hills and ridges rising into mountain-like masses in the distance…. The whole landscape showed design, like man’s noblest sculptures. How wonderful the power of its beauty! Gazing awestricken, I might have left everything for it. Glad, endless work would then be mine tracing the forces that have brought forth its features, its rocks and plants and animals and glorious weather. Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever.

  The next day Muir’s immersion in the boundless beauty of the Sierras yielded the following:

  June 6

  We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams, and rocks, in the waves of the sun—a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal…. How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is, scare memory enough of the old bondage days left as a standpoint to view it from!

  Muir’s experiences in the Sierras opened his mind to new scientific insights: He was the first to argue that Yosemite Valley was formed by glaciers, as opposed to earthquakes, the conventional wisdom of the day. Out of these experiences Muir published on the need to preserve the Sierras from the ravages of sheep and cows in the influential magazine Century. These well-placed essays led to a bill passed by Congress on September 30, 1890, designating Yosemite as a state park. Buoyed by this success, Muir founded the Sierra club in 1892 and served as its first president until his dying day.

  Today, when back-country hikers find high-altitude jen on the John Muir Trail in the Sierras, they are there because of John Muir. So too are groups of inner-city children backpacking near Yosemite in programs sponsored by the Sierra Club. When psychologist Frances Kuo finds in her research that adding trees and lawns to housing projects in Chicago leads local residents to feel greater calm, focus, and well-being, and crime rates drop, she is testing hypotheses that trace back to Muir’s transformative experiences of awe.

  The thread that awe weaves through the life of John Muir is as revealing about the structure of this transcendent emotion as any study a scientist might deign to conduct. It is a high-wattage experience, nearly as rare as birth, marriage, and death, one that transforms people, energizes them in the pursuit of the meaningful life and in the service of the greater good. Science, until recently, has shied away from the study of awe. Perhaps Lao Tzu’s admonition is right:

  The way that can be spoken of

  Is not the constant way;

  The name that can be named

  Is not the constant name.

  The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;

  The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.

  Perhaps science, built upon essentialist names and quantification, could never unearth the secrets of awe. Perhaps matters of the spirit operate according to different laws than materialistic conceptions of human nature. Not to be deterred by these concerns, evolutionists have recently begun to make the case that Muir’s experiences of wonder and awe are examples of emotions designed to enable people to fold cooperatively into complex social groups, to quiet the voice of self-interest, and to feel a sense of reverence for the collective.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF AWE

  That John Muir could stand in the Sierras and experience a sense of the sacred when surrounded by the pine, manzanita, granite, cascading water, and dark lakes of those mountains is a testimony to radical thinkers who fought pitched battles about the nature of the sublime (awe) and the beautiful. These thinkers liberated the experience of awe, wonder, and the sacred from the strictures of organized religion, which had laid claim to this powerful emotion, no doubt because of its transformative powers. Most directly, Muir’s experience in the Sierras traces back to Ralph Waldo Emerson:

  In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

  And Emerson could preach transcendentalism in nature as a result of Enlightenment philosophers, in particular Edmund Burke, whose more secular musings provide clues to how our capacity for awe and wonder evolved.

  Early in human history awe was reserved for feelings toward divine beings. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus involved a blinding light, feelings of awe and terror, and a voice guiding him to abandon his persecution of the Christians. In the climax of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the hero of the story, Arjuna, loses his nerve on the eve of battle. To provide Arjuna a sense of higher purpose, Krishna (a form of the god Vishnu) gives Arjuna a “cosmic eye” allowing Arjuna to see gods and suns and to experience infinite time and space. He is filled with amazement (vismitas). His hair stands on end. He prostrates himself before Krishna, begs for forbearance, and hears and heeds Krishna’s command: “Do works for Me, make Me your highest goal, be loyal-in-love to Me, cut off all [other] attachments…”

  In 1757, with the age of enlightenment, political revolution, and the promise of science in the air, Irish philosopher Edmund Burke transformed our understanding of awe. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke detailed how we feel the sublime (awe) in hearing thunder, in viewing art, in hearing a symphony, in seeing repetitive patterns of light and dark, even in response to certain animals (the ox) rather than others (a cow). Odors, Burke observed, could not produce the feeling of the sublime. In these mundane and purely descriptive observations, Burke was advancing a radical claim fitting for his times: Awe is not restricted to experiences of the divine; it is an emotion of expanded thought and greatness of mind that is produced by literature, poetry, painting, viewing landscapes, and a variety of everyday perceptual experiences.

  Burke believed the two essential ingredients to the experience of awe are power and obscurity. On power, Burke wrote: “whereso-ever we find strength, and in what light soever we look upon power we shall all along observe the sublime the concomitant of terror.” On obscurity, Burke argued that awe follows from the perception of objects that the mind has difficulty grasping. Obscure images in painting are more likely to produce sublime feelings (Monet) than those that are clearly rend
ered (Pissarro). Despotic governments keep their leader obscure from the populace to enhance that leader’s capacity to evoke awe.

  Today in the West, awe has been liberated; we are following in Burke’s footsteps. In my research, when I ask individuals to recount their last experience of awe, they most typically recall experiences of interest to Burke. They write about nature, art, charismatic, famous people, experiences of the sacred, powerful perceptual experiences, experiences when meditating or praying or contemplating the divine. But the spirit of democracy has spread through awe. People are also likely to recall experiences of awe when the Red Sox broke the curse, when hearing Steve Reich for the first time, after a bowl of celery soup at Chez Panisse, at the end of The Brothers Karamazov, when lifted aloft in the mosh pit at an Iggy Pop show, when an insight about their past occurs during therapy, at the birth of their children, their last experience of sex, drinking wine, a trip on LSD, a lucid dream. Awe has been used in the service of unadulterated evil—one only needs to think of Hitler’s rallies to realize how readily this sacred emotion can be used to malevolent ends.

  To bring some order to this cacophony of transcendence, Jon Haidt and I offered the following analysis of the varieties of awe (see table below).

  AN APPROACH TO AWE AND ITS RELATED STATES

  Prototypical experiences of awe involve perceived vastness, anything that is experienced as being much larger than the self or the self’s typical frame of reference. Vastness can be physical (standing next to a 389-foot redwood, seeing Shaquille O’Neal’s size 22 hightops or the expanse of Chichén Itzá). Vastness can be acoustic (thunder, a thunderous electric organ). Vastness can be social (standing near the Dalai Lama, dining next to a celebrity). Ideas, feelings, and sensations can be vast when they transcend what has been known or felt before. Vastness becomes awe-inspiring when it requires accommodation—the process by which we update and change our core beliefs.