The Dark Side of Awe
I read a book last year that gave me the strangest feeling. I felt good about humanity. Human beings weren’t a natural disaster. We weren’t destined to kill everything on the planet, including ourselves. The awe we experience at music concerts, or under a carpet of stars in the mountains, could recalibrate the moral compass of the world. Awe leads “to goodwill, cooperation, and a transformed sense of self as part of a community,” wrote the author Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
The book is called Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Although my image of hell is a library of self-help books, I was won over by Awe. The science and research are sound, the writing is fluid and engaging, and the examples of people whose lives have been transformed by awe are convincing. Stacy Bare, a traumatized Iraq war veteran, overcomes the suicidal voices in his head by taking up rock climbing, skiing, and rafting. His experiences of “wild awe” inspire him to dedicate his life to help other veterans shed their troubled minds in the outdoors.
As the days wore on after I read Awe, and bad news continued to unreel around the world, the glow of the book began to fade. Keltner’s definition of awe—“the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand”—felt sentimental to me. The emotion of awe, bonding people into communities, was the root of polarization—my tribe is better than your tribe, my awe tells me so. The book had some holes in it.
When came out in paperback this month, I emailed Keltner and asked if he was game for hearing out my misgivings. He was.
