Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt asks a simple, but difficult question: why do we search for self-transcendence? Why do we attempt to lose ourselves? In a tour through the science of evolution by group selection, he proposes a provocative answer.

I have a question for you:

Are you religious?

Please raise your hand right now

if you think of yourself as a religious person.

Let's see, I'd say about three or four percent.

I had no idea there were so many believers at a TED Conference.

(Laughter)

Okay, here's another question:

Do you think of yourself as spiritual

in any way, shape or form? Raise your hand.

Okay, that's the majority.

My Talk today

is about the main reason, or one of the main reasons,

why most people consider themselves

to be spiritual in some way, shape or form.

My Talk today is about self-transcendence.

It's just a basic fact about being human

that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

And when that happens,

the feeling is ecstatic

and we reach for metaphors of up and down

to explain these feelings.

We talk about being uplifted

or elevated.

Now it's really hard to think about anything abstract like this

without a good concrete metaphor.

So here's the metaphor I'm offering today.

Think about the mind as being like a house with many rooms,

most of which we're very familiar with.

But sometimes it's as though a doorway appears

from out of nowhere

and it opens onto a staircase.

We climb the staircase

and experience a state of altered consciousness.

In 1902,

the great American psychologist William James

wrote about the many varieties of religious experience.

He collected all kinds of case studies.

He quoted the words of all kinds of people

who'd had a variety of these experiences.

One of the most exciting to me

is this young man, Stephen Bradley,

had an encounter, he thought, with Jesus in 1820.

And here's what Bradley said about it.

(Music)

(Video) Stephen Bradley: I thought I saw the savior in human shape

for about one second in the room,

with arms extended,

appearing to say to me, "Come."

The next day I rejoiced with trembling.

My happiness was so great that I said I wanted to die.

This world had no place in my affections.

Previous to this time,

I was very selfish and self-righteous.

But now I desired the welfare of all mankind

and could, with a feeling heart,

forgive my worst enemies.

JH: So note

how Bradley's petty, moralistic self

just dies on the way up the staircase.

And on this higher level

he becomes loving and forgiving.

The world's many religions have found so many ways

to help people climb the staircase.

Some shut down the self using meditation.

Others use psychedelic drugs.

This is from a 16th century Aztec scroll

showing a man about to eat a psilocybin mushroom

and at the same moment get yanked up the staircase by a god.

Others use dancing, spinning and circling

to promote self-transcendence.

But you don't need a religion to get you through the staircase.

Lots of people find self-transcendence in nature.

Others overcome their self at raves.

But here's the weirdest place of all:

war.

So many books about war say the same thing,

that nothing brings people together

like war.

And that bringing them together opens up the possibility

of extraordinary self-transcendent experiences.

I'm going to play for you an excerpt

from this book by Glenn Gray.

Gray was a soldier in the American army in World War II.

And after the war he interviewed a lot of other soldiers

and wrote about the experience of men in battle.

Here's a key passage

where he basically describes the staircase.

(Video) Glenn Gray: Many veterans will admit

that the experience of communal effort in battle

has been the high point of their lives.

"I" passes insensibly into a "we,"

"my" becomes "our"

and individual faith

loses its central importance.

I believe that it is nothing less

than the assurance of immortality

that makes self-sacrifice at these moments

so relatively easy.

I may fall, but I do not die,

for that which is real in me goes forward

and lives on in the comrades

for whom I gave up my life.

JH: So what all of these cases have in common

is that the self seems to thin out, or melt away,

and it feels good, it feels really good,

in a way totally unlike anything we feel in our normal lives.

It feels somehow uplifting.

This idea that we move up was central in the writing

of the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim.

Durkheim even called us Homo duplex,

or two-level man.

The lower level he called the level of the profane.

Now profane is the opposite of sacred.

It just means ordinary or common.

And in our ordinary lives we exist as individuals.

We want to satisfy our individual desires.

We pursue our individual goals.

But sometimes something happens

that triggers a phase change.

Individuals unite

into a team, a movement or a nation,

which is far more than the sum of its parts.

Durkheim called this level the level of the sacred

because he believed that the function of religion

was to unite people into a group,

into a moral community.

Durkheim believed that anything that unites us

takes on an air of sacredness.

And once people circle around

some sacred object or value,

they'll then work as a team and fight to defend it.

Durkheim wrote

about a set of intense collective emotions

that accomplish this miracle of E pluribus unum,

of making a group out of individuals.

Think of the collective joy in Britain

on the day World War II ended.

Think of the collective anger in Tahrir Square,

which brought down a dictator.

And think of the collective grief

in the United States

that we all felt, that brought us all together,

after 9/11.

So let me summarize where we are.

I'm saying that the capacity for self-transcendence

is just a basic part of being human.

I'm offering the metaphor

of a staircase in the mind.

I'm saying we are Homo duplex

and this staircase takes us up from the profane level

to the level of the sacred.

When we climb that staircase,

self-interest fades away,

we become just much less self-interested,

and we feel as though we are better, nobler

and somehow uplifted.

So here's the million-dollar question

for social scientists like me:

Is the staircase

a feature of our evolutionary design?

Is it a product of natural selection,

like our hands?

Or is it a bug, a mistake in the system --

this religious stuff is just something

that happens when the wires cross in the brain --

Jill has a stroke and she has this religious experience,

it's just a mistake?

Well many scientists who study religion take this view.

The New Atheists, for example,

argue that religion is a set of memes,

sort of parasitic memes,

that get inside our minds

and make us do all kinds of crazy religious stuff,

self-destructive stuff, like suicide bombing.

And after all,

how could it ever be good for us

to lose ourselves?

How could it ever be adaptive

for any organism

to overcome self-interest?

Well let me show you.

In "The Descent of Man,"

Charles Darwin wrote a great deal

about the evolution of morality --

where did it come from, why do we have it.

Darwin noted that many of our virtues

are of very little use to ourselves,

but they're of great use to our groups.

He wrote about the scenario

in which two tribes of early humans

would have come in contact and competition.

He said, "If the one tribe included

a great number of courageous, sympathetic

and faithful members

who are always ready to aid and defend each other,

this tribe would succeed better

and conquer the other."

He went on to say that "Selfish and contentious people

will not cohere,

and without coherence

nothing can be effected."

In other words,

Charles Darwin believed

in group selection.

Now this idea has been very controversial for the last 40 years,

but it's about to make a major comeback this year,

especially after E.O. Wilson's book comes out in April,

making a very strong case

that we, and several other species,

are products of group selection.

But really the way to think about this

is as multilevel selection.

So look at it this way:

You've got competition going on within groups and across groups.

So here's a group of guys on a college crew team.

Within this team

there's competition.

There are guys competing with each other.

The slowest rowers, the weakest rowers, are going to get cut from the team.

And only a few of these guys are going to go on in the sport.

Maybe one of them will make it to the Olympics.

So within the team,

their interests are actually pitted against each other.

And sometimes it would be advantageous

for one of these guys

to try to sabotage the other guys.

Maybe he'll badmouth his chief rival

to the coach.

But while that competition is going on

within the boat,

this competition is going on across boats.

And once you put these guys in a boat competing with another boat,

now they've got no choice but to cooperate

because they're all in the same boat.

They can only win

if they all pull together as a team.

I mean, these things sound trite,

but they are deep evolutionary truths.

The main argument against group selection

has always been

that, well sure, it would be nice to have a group of cooperators,

but as soon as you have a group of cooperators,

they're just going to get taken over by free-riders,

individuals that are going to exploit the hard work of the others.

Let me illustrate this for you.

Suppose we've got a group of little organisms --

they can be bacteria, they can be hamsters; it doesn't matter what --

and let's suppose that this little group here, they evolved to be cooperative.

Well that's great. They graze, they defend each other,

they work together, they generate wealth.

And as you'll see in this simulation,

as they interact they gain points, as it were, they grow,

and when they've doubled in size, you'll see them split,

and that's how they reproduce and the population grows.

But suppose then that one of them mutates.

There's a mutation in the gene

and one of them mutates to follow a selfish strategy.

It takes advantage of the others.

And so when a green interacts with a blue,

you'll see the green gets larger and the blue gets smaller.

So here's how things play out.

We start with just one green,

and as it interacts

it gains wealth or points or food.

And in short order, the cooperators are done for.

The free-riders have taken over.

If a group cannot solve the free-rider problem

then it cannot reap the benefits of cooperation

and group selection cannot get started.

But there are solutions to the free-rider problem.

It's not that hard a problem.

In fact, nature has solved it many, many times.

And nature's favorite solution

is to put everyone in the same boat.

For example,

why is it that the mitochondria in every cell

has its own DNA,

totally separate from the DNA in the nucleus?

It's because they used to be

separate free-living bacteria

and they came together

and became a superorganism.

Somehow or other -- maybe one swallowed another; we'll never know exactly why --

but once they got a membrane around them,

they were all in the same membrane,

now all the wealth-created division of labor,

all the greatness created by cooperation,

stays locked inside the membrane

and we've got a superorganism.

And now let's rerun the simulation

putting one of these superorganisms

into a population of free-riders, of defectors, of cheaters

and look what happens.

A superorganism can basically take what it wants.

It's so big and powerful and efficient

that it can take resources

from the greens, from the defectors, the cheaters.

And pretty soon the whole population

is actually composed of these new superorganisms.

What I've shown you here

is sometimes called a major transition

in evolutionary history.

Darwin's laws don't change,

but now there's a new kind of player on the field

and things begin to look very different.

Now this transition was not a one-time freak of nature

that just happened with some bacteria.

It happened again

about 120 or a 140 million years ago

when some solitary wasps

began creating little simple, primitive

nests, or hives.

Once several wasps were all together in the same hive,

they had no choice but to cooperate,

because pretty soon they were locked into competition

with other hives.

And the most cohesive hives won,

just as Darwin said.

These early wasps

gave rise to the bees and the ants

that have covered the world

and changed the biosphere.

And it happened again,

even more spectacularly,

in the last half-million years

when our own ancestors

became cultural creatures,

they came together around a hearth or a campfire,

they divided labor,

they began painting their bodies, they spoke their own dialects,

and eventually they worshiped their own gods.

Once they were all in the same tribe,

they could keep the benefits of cooperation locked inside.

And they unlocked the most powerful force

ever known on this planet,

which is human cooperation --

a force for construction

and destruction.

Of course, human groups are nowhere near as cohesive

as beehives.

Human groups may look like hives for brief moments,

but they tend to then break apart.

We're not locked into cooperation the way bees and ants are.

In fact, often,

as we've seen happen in a lot of the Arab Spring revolts,

often those divisions are along religious lines.

Nonetheless, when people do come together

and put themselves all into the same movement,

they can move mountains.

Look at the people in these photos I've been showing you.

Do you think they're there

pursuing their self-interest?

Or are they pursuing communal interest,

which requires them to lose themselves

and become simply a part of a whole?

Okay, so that was my Talk

delivered in the standard TED way.

And now I'm going to give the whole Talk over again

in three minutes

in a more full-spectrum sort of way.

(Music)

(Video) Jonathan Haidt: We humans have many varieties

of religious experience,

as William James explained.

One of the most common is climbing the secret staircase

and losing ourselves.

The staircase takes us

from the experience of life as profane or ordinary

upwards to the experience of life as sacred,

or deeply interconnected.

We are Homo duplex,

as Durkheim explained.

And we are Homo duplex

because we evolved by multilevel selection,

as Darwin explained.

I can't be certain if the staircase is an adaptation

rather than a bug,

but if it is an adaptation,

then the implications are profound.

If it is an adaptation,

then we evolved to be religious.

I don't mean that we evolved

to join gigantic organized religions.

Those things came along too recently.

I mean that we evolved

to see sacredness all around us

and to join with others into teams

and circle around sacred objects,

people and ideas.

This is why politics is so tribal.

Politics is partly profane, it's partly about self-interest,

but politics is also about sacredness.

It's about joining with others

to pursue moral ideas.

It's about the eternal struggle between good and evil,

and we all believe we're on the good team.

And most importantly,

if the staircase is real,

it explains the persistent undercurrent

of dissatisfaction in modern life.

Because human beings are, to some extent,

hivish creatures like bees.

We're bees. We busted out of the hive during the Enlightenment.

We broke down the old institutions

and brought liberty to the oppressed.

We unleashed Earth-changing creativity

and generated vast wealth and comfort.

Nowadays we fly around

like individual bees exulting in our freedom.

But sometimes we wonder:

Is this all there is?

What should I do with my life?

What's missing?

What's missing is that we are Homo duplex,

but modern, secular society was built

to satisfy our lower, profane selves.

It's really comfortable down here on the lower level.

Come, have a seat in my home entertainment center.

One great challenge of modern life

is to find the staircase amid all the clutter

and then to do something good and noble

once you climb to the top.

I see this desire in my students at the University of Virginia.

They all want to find a cause or calling

that they can throw themselves into.

They're all searching for their staircase.

And that gives me hope

because people are not purely selfish.

Most people long to overcome pettiness

and become part of something larger.

And this explains the extraordinary resonance

of this simple metaphor

conjured up nearly 400 years ago.

"No man is an island

entire of itself.

Every man is a piece of the continent,

a part of the main."

JH: Thank you.

(Applause)