Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

A Darwinian study of awe is documenting the physiological underpinnings of our capacity to devote ourselves to the collective. It involves the bodily manifestation of expanding beyond ourselves (goose bumps) and connection (the vagus nerve). It transforms self-representation from that which separates to that which unites. It activates regions of the brain associated with goal-directed behavior and approach, a perspective upon the self, and pleasure. In its ultimate origins in evolution, the sacred is social. Our capacity for wonder and reverence is rooted in the body.

WIRED FOR JEN

 

The experience of awe is about finding your place in the larger scheme of things. It is about quieting the press of self-interest. It is about folding into social collectives. It is about feeling reverential toward participating in some expansive process that unites us all and that ennobles our life’s endeavors.

For Charles Darwin, it was his trip on the Beagle, and transcendent experiences in the Andes, in the Galápagos, around the cape, and with the hunter-gatherer people he saw during his five-year voyage. After wandering through a forest in the Amazon, he mused: “It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose.” The forest was “a temple filled with varied productions of the God of Nature.” In his observations of flowers, and beetles, and flatworms, and armadillos and trees, he began to discern some force—natural selection—that united them all. Humans were, in the words of Darwin biographer Janet Browne, “just a small part of a much larger interlocking system of life on earth.”

For cell biologist Ursula Goodenough, the biochemical processes that make up life and living are sacred. How life-forms emerged in the hot mud of billions of years ago, how two sex cells combine to develop into the human, how DNA evolved over time—these questions stirred her soul. Her understanding of these biological processes is filled with the sense of design, beauty, and vastness that stirred Muir’s feelings about the Sierras.

In my short scientific life, my feelings of wonder and reverence began one moment in a lab as a post-doc, a late afternoon when I first began applying the tools of the Facial Action Coding System. These tools allowed me to freeze human action in the millisecond frame of a videotape and take a Darwinian journey, tracing our positive emotions as they manifest today back in evolutionary time to the social dynamics that gave rise to such forms. The emotions that I have been so fortunate to capture in my lab, just for a fragile, fleeting instant, have their evolutionary provenance in a reverence and respect for others, and “identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.” A teenager’s blush triggers a forgiving smile from parents, and conflict and tension subside. A deferential smile and “thank you” between bag boy and elderly woman in the checkout line spread respect and enhance our faith in the human endeavor, if only for a moment or two. Parents, pushing infants on swings, fill a space with smiles, coos, and laughs, creating a warm environment of trust and goodwill. Songs of laughter ripple through couples, friends, families, auditoriums, linking minds in cooperative, lighthearted play. With the subtle turn of a phrase or use of the voice, spouses and siblings and parents and their children transform thorny conflicts into playful banter. Kind embraces spread from child to friend to grandparent. We have neuropeptides that enable trust and devotion, and a branch of nerves that connects the brain, the voice, and the heart that enables caretaking. Our capacity for awe has given us art, a sense of the sacred. We have genes, neurotransmitters, and regions of the brain that serve these emotions as we serve others. These emotions are the substance of jen. Evolution has produced a mind that evolves toward an appreciation of the vastness of our collective design, and emotions that enable us to enact these loftier notions. We are wired for good.

NOTES

 

JEN SCIENCE

 

in honor of the Confucian concept of jen: For an excellent summary of Confucius’s life, times, and philosophy, see Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation (New York: Anchor, 2006), 240–51.

Jen is the central idea in: Wing-Tsit Chan, trans., A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), chap. 6. Below are some other quotes from Wing-Tsit Chan’s translation of the analects of Confucius that provide an understanding of jen: