Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

evolutionists have recently begun to make the case: David Sloan Wilson and Elliot Sober are the most well-known advocates of the more general thesis that several adaptations enable more cohesive groups. One such example, Sloan Wilson argues, is religion, which builds stronger and more cohesive groups. They offer a variant of a group selectionist argument, arguing that these kinds of adaptations evolved to enable groups to out-compete other groups in group-to-group competition. The end result is that groups comprised of individuals with traits that give them an advantage vis-à-vis other groups will be more likely to survive and successfully replicate genes, and those traits will be selected for. This thesis is generating a good deal of controversy because it challenges the widespread assumption that natural selection operates only at the level of genes. I approach these group-related human adaptations from a different perspective, assuming that the human capacities that enable more cooperative groups—a sense of reverence for the group, art, dance, play—are selected for because they create conditions that enable less conflict and greater chances of survival and gene replication. From this perspective, group-related adaptations like awe influence survival and gene replication indirectly, through creating conditions more felicitous to natural and sexual selection. For a full treatment of these ideas, and a provocative account of multilevel selection theory, see Sober and Wilson, Unto Others; D. Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

traces back to Ralph Waldo Emerson: Emerson, “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 1982), 39.

in particular Edmund Burke: Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus: “Letters to the Galatians,” The New American Bible, ed. S. J. Hartdegen et al. (London: Thomas Nelson, 1987), 1320.

“Do works for Me”: R. C. Zaehner, trans., The Bhagavad-Gita (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).

To bring some order to this cacophony of transcendence: D. Keltner and J. Haidt, “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Aesthetic, and Spiritual Emotion,” Cognition and Emotion 17 (2003): 297–314.

Our experiences of powerful, charismatic humans: Our reasoning about the relationship between awe and power was profoundly influenced by Max Weber’s writings on this topic. Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

Aesthetic properties of the stimulus: For an excellent overview of the study of aesthetics, see M. C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1966).

Encounters with extraordinary virtue: Haidt and Keltner, “Appreciation of Beauty and Excellent (Awe, Wonder, Elevation),” 537–51.

The Greek philosopher Protagoras: Plato, Protagoras and Meno, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie (New York: Penguin, 1956).

In his beautifully distilled book: Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

small specks of time and matter in the vastness of the universe: Philosopher Thomas Nagel has long been interested in how shifts in perspective upon the self, wherein one looks upon the self from a detached, outside-the-self perspective, lead to states like the feeling of absurdity or awe. Nagel argues that in experiences like the sense of absurdity, we move from the absolutist demands of the inner and attached point of view, where what is real, true, and right is only what I believe and see, to an alternative layer of meaning. We move, feeling light and open, to a perspective where we view our lives, again in Nagel’s terms, from an outer, detached point of view. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Evolutionists like David Sloan Wilson: Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral.

staging epiphanies: A. Joyce Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Movement (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1987).

We found that goose bumps are fairly unique to awe: B. Campos et al., “Positive Emotion,” unpublished manuscript.