Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

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.