Sheldon Solomon, he's a Professor of Psychology at Skidmore College. Amazing speaker. You will find that out. He speaks worldwide. And is under great demand, and so that's why it's so fortunate that we are able to have him here and host him. And this wonderful that you come here. What's remarkable about Sheldon Solomon is that at his age he can actually make it to here from Skidmore. He'll get back at me. Let's welcome Sheldon Solomon. >> [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you. How's that soundwise? Folks back in coach, can you hear that okay? All right. Sounds good. Thank you so much, Pam and Len for having me. This is my second visit to Rutgers in the context of this course. I was here two years ago and I had a great time. And what I learned from my brief stint here is that you all are in my estimation just very lucky to be in a course of this nature. I hope that you're having a good experience and appreciate, from my perspective at least, how neat it is in a college environment where, I don't know what it's been like. Anybody have a boring course yet? Of course you have. You're Americans, and a lot of college courses are like non-pharmacological interventions for insomnia. But I would like to think that a course about the nature of soul beliefs, soul is one of the oldest and most universal concepts in the history of humankind. Across time and across space, there are no people that we are aware of, from modern humans on, that don't have strong beliefs in the soul. And just the idea of so many of you being interested in thinking about this subject in a respectful, and ecumenical fashion. I think it's tremendous, and you're lucky to have an academic venue in which to explore these ideas. I'm lucky to be here. Dan flatters me when he says that I'm a good bullshitter, I mean a good speaker, and it is true that I get to talk all over Earth and it's a lot of fun to do so. But this is neat for me because I grew up kind of in the hood. I grew up in Fords, New Jersey. I don't know if that rings a bell for anybody, and I graduated from Woodbridge High School, 1971. And despite that, I ended up in college and graduate school. And I'm a professor these days, and I had a great time in Woodbridge. I don't know, any Woodbridge folks? I know the last time I was here there were some alumni, had a great time in Woodbridge, and I'm being silly. And so, always great to come back to where I started out, and to get to talk to folks. All right, let's get down to business. What I would like to do this afternoon is to just give you one psychological take on the nature of soul beliefs. Not the only take, but one, just to toss out for your collective consideration. And most of the ideas that I have to offer you today are not mine. They actually come from a cultural anthropologist, a guy named Ernest Becker. And he is from the last century. He died in 1974 at the young age of 49. And he wrote a number of books, but I'm going to rely on ideas from three of them. One is called The Birth and Death of Meaning. Another book, it was called The Denial of Death, for which Becker won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. And then a final book that he wrote is called Escape From Evil. And by the way, if I say anything interesting that you'd like to follow up on, you have a handout that we're going to use just to march our way through the material today. And at the end of the handout should be my email address. All right, is it there? Is it? Yeah. And so I hope you'll feel free writing to me. So if you want to take notes, fine. But if there's something that's of interest to you, like book titles. Or if you want to see any of the articles that I talk about, just blast me a message, and I'm happy to send you materials. Anyway, Becker was a cultural anthropologist. And he wrote about lots of things, including the nature of soulhood. But the way that Becker went about developing his ideas was from what we today in psychology would call a motivational perspective. And what I mean by that in English is that in his book, The Birth and Death of Meaning, Becker said, what I would like to do is understand why people do the things that they do when they do them. And I always thought that was a disarmingly simple and profound question. Why do we do what we do when we do it? And the point is, that if we can get some kind of general handle on the motivational underpinnings of human behavior, that might give us some insights about the nature of soul. What he then does though, is to say, you know what? The first thing that we have to do is we have to lay out what he calls epistemological guidelines. Who's ever heard that word? Epistemology? It's not a very familiar word. At Skidmore, students are like, oh my God, don't do it. I don't want to study urinary tract disorder. So I don't want to talk about anything with piss in the word. All right, but for the more philosophically inclined, that's just a fancy word for how it is that we could know anything. Epistemology is just the study of the nature of knowledge. And what Becker asked us to do, very quickly, is to consider four epistemological assumptions. All right, assumption number one is that no single academic discipline has a lock on the truth. And if we want to understand very general attributes of what it means to be a human being, including the nature of soul, that we can't do that from any one disciplinary perspective. That's why this is great, who's in your first year? I know I may have asked you that already. This is great, that as young students you're in a course that's fundamentally interdisciplinary. So Becker said, hey, I'm an anthropologist and sure, we're going to talk about anthropology. But we're going to also talk about psychology, philosophy, theology, sociology, literature, popular culture, music and film. His point is, is whenever you're dabbling in big ideas, it would behoove us to really cast the intellectual net as widely as possible. And be willing to consider all ideas in a respectful and yet critical fashion. But then he turns right around in his second epistemological assumption is that, on the one hand, we want to consider all ideas. On the other hand, not all ideas are created equal. Some ideas are better than others. And so his second assumption is that we need to be empirical. And that's just a fancy word for we need to be willing to test our ideas in order to determine which ones are better than others. His third assumption is let's just call it, wait, time out for a second. Vodka, very good. >> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] His third assumption. Who's ever heard of the Enlightenment, back in the old days? Becker comes from the Enlightenment tradition, and the third assumption is that we want to be practical. We want to develop ideas that are not only interesting but hopefully useful. What can we learn about the nature of the human animal? What can we learn about the nature of soul that might actually have an influence on the way that we live our lives, and the way that we contribute to changing the world around us, as maybe naively optimistic as it sounds, to leave the world a little bit better than the condition in which we found it? And his fourth epistemological assumption is that we need to position any idea that we have about the nature of humankind in the context of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Now I know Dan has already talked, or Len, you've talked about Darwin. So give me head shakes for an emotional boost if you've heard that name before. Darwin's idea is evolution by natural selection. Probably on everybody's list of the top two or three most important ideas in the history of earth, and it is the most durable scientific theory in history. And Becker's point is that it's highly unlikely that any psychological notion that is not compatible with an evolutionary framework will be ultimately sustainable in the long run. All right, so with that in mind, let's just dabble in Darwin momentarily. And who remembers Darwin's basic idea that all forms of life share in common a basic biological predisposition towards self-preservation in the service of survival and reproduction? Head shakes if that rings a bell. English translation, all living things like to stay alive, and human beings are no exception. But Darwin also recognized that different forms of life have radically different ways of accomplishing that most arduous task of persisting over time. So you know this and I'm doing too much work. What's the giraffe got going for it that helps it stay alive? >> Neck. >> Good, got the big neck. What about the cactus? Good, stores water and the thorns. The skunk? >> Spraying. >> Stinks. It's done nothing for my social life, but the skunk has parlayed that into millions of years of evolutionary success. Well, what about people? And here it gets interesting, because Darwin himself was aware of the fact that human beings are curious because from a purely physical point of view we're really not that formidable as autonomous physical entities. What I mean by that is that humans are not big compared to a lion. And we're not fast compared to a cheetah. We don't have good eyesight compared to an eagle. Our sense of smell is terrible compared to a dog. We don't have sharp teeth or sharp claws. And that raises the question of why is it that we're even here? And Darwin's answer to that question is that we're here today for two reasons. One is that we are profoundly social creatures. You know this or you ought know this. We're not here today because any of us are individually capable of surviving on our own. Rather, we're here today because we possess the exquisite facility for cooperating with each other in the construction and maintenance of a host of elaborate institutions that facilitate our collective survival. In other words, none of you would make it until tomorrow if we dropped you in the middle of a forest without your cell phones and your Facebook page and nuclear missiles. You'd be dead by the end of the day. But together we can build roads and schools and hospitals and all the things that make life not only possible but pleasant. But it's more than that. It's not only that we're highly gregarious creatures. Darwin also observed that we are fantastically intelligent creatures to boot. All right, now who's aware of the fact that other forms of life are very, very smart? All right, who's also aware of the fact perhaps, that intelligence is vastly overrated? The Unabomber was smart, and I would argue that there are other attributes that we should value as much as intelligence. But one of the things that Becker asks us to ponder is that humans are unique because we, as far as we can tell, are alone in the natural world. That we are the only form of life that, by virtue of our ginormous forebrains, are able to imagine things that do not yet exist. And then to have the audacity to transform our dreams into reality. You know this, I hope, some of you from high school. Who was doodling little pictures of helicopters in his notebooks in the 1500s? Belt it out, I heard it. Da Vinci. Whose ever heard of that guy? All right, and what did they say when Da Vinci was drawing pictures of helicopters? Anybody? >> You're crazy. >> Yeah, you're fucking crazy. What are you doing, bro? You need a large, large pill. And yet who's ever been on an airplane? Anybody? All right, so isn't this amazing that today we are routinely transported by what was originally denounced as the doodlings of a madman? One of my favorite psychologists, a guy named Otto Rank, he just says that only human beings make the unreal real. And can we agree that that's tremendous? Other creatures must accept the world in the form in which they encounter it. Only human beings, if we don't like reality, are able to alter it at least somewhat in accordance with our desires. All right, let's go back in time a little bit. Darwin's 1850s mas or menos a year or two. Let's go back to the 1840s and talk a little bit about the dead Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Who's ever heard the name Kierkegaard? Very hard, but worth the effort because Kierkegaard was way ahead of his time. Long before psychologists ever thought about this, Kierkegaard said in a very convoluted way, you know what? People are so smart that we actually come to realize that we exist. In psychology today, we would call that notion consciousness or self-awareness. This may be pretty obvious, but humor me. Who's aware of the fact that you're here now, listening to me or pretending to do so? Can I get some hands? All right, cool. At Skidmore I can get 50%, but you're a little bit more alert. And the point is that a neurologically intact human being, after the age of four or five, is aware of her or his existence. Not only are you aware of the fact that you exist, but you're aware of that fact. You ever been walking to the dining hall, let's say? You ever be walking there and say, here I am walking to the dining hall? Do you ever have one of those moments? You ever walk to the dining hall saying here I am walking to the dining hall, thinking about that I'm walking to the dining hall? You ever walk to the dining hall thinking about the fact that you're thinking about the fact that you're walking to the dining hall? And you could do that ad nauseum until you grope for a giant barrel of alcohol in order to get yourself out of this perseverating cycle of self introspection. But the point for Kierkegaard, and this is an important one, Is that it takes a ridiculously, sophisticated, cognitive apparatus to render yourself the object of your own subjective inquiry. All right. If you want say something to your parents at Thanksgiving to justify tuition. Just spit that one out. They won't understand it, but they may send you to college for another semester. That's the way Kierkegaard presented it. He said that only human beings are smart enough to realize that we exist. As far as we know, we're the only creatures that are not only here, but we know that we're here. And well so what? Well according to Kierkegaard, once you are conscious, once you are aware of the fact that you exist, you will necessarily experience two uniquely human emotions that Kierkegaard called awe,and dread respectively. And these terms are somewhat self-explanatory. Who's ever heard the term awesome? Awesome, when you hear that term does that exude good or bad vibes, good or bad? Good, awesome is good. Whoever's woken up one day and nothing particularly important has happened? You didn't win a Nobel Prize, you didn't win the lottery, your favorite sports team didn't win the World Series or the Super Bowl. But you just woke up, and it was a beautiful day and you got a face full of fresh air, and you just said to yourself, it's fucking great to be alive. Anybody ever have one of those moments? Good. Savor that moment, because the point that Kierkegaard made, is that it is really one of the most uniquely human joys, is to not only be alive, but to know that we're alive and to appreciate that fact. All right, hold that thought. It is awesome to be alive. But, he turned right around and he said yes, but it's also dreadful to be alive and to know it, because unless you're either a child or an idiot, if you know that you're alive, you also recognize that like all living things, your life is of finite duration and that you will someday die. It's such a beautiful day and I don't want to ruin it for you but who keeps lists of things to do? Any list keepers? Walk the dog, pay the cell phone bill, die. >> [LAUGH] >> All right, that's really rarely on anybody's list of things to accomplish in any particular day. And the point the Kierkegaard made is that this is a tremendously unwelcome realization. >> And what some people argue, and what Dan and I have talked about sometimes over the years, it's that this may have been psychologically speaking, one of the most momentous events in the history of humankind, is when we realized the inevitability of our mortality. >> As an unintended consequences of consciousness which is internal reflection of our vast intelligence. All right, not to ruin your day, but it gets worse than that. I don't know about you, but I'm not a big fan of dying, but who might be all right with dying if you got to have a really long life, and you were healthy until the end? And at the end of your life you could just be kind of hanging out with your family as they're linked, arm in arm, chanting Kumbaya as they send you into the afterlife. Would anybody be all right with that? I'd be all right with that. But what about if we walk outside in an hour, and you get smolten or smitten by a meteor. How would that be? Right? What about if you're, a bomb is dropped on your home, if you happen to live in Syria? And your entire family, including yourself, is vaporized. Who's ever had a stomach ache or a headache? All right, that'd be fine. But what if that's like a softball sized tumor that is the harbinger of bad things to come? The point that Kierkegaard made, is that it's not only the prospect of dying that is tremendously unpalatable from a psychological point of view. It is the calm, committent realization that your death can occur at any time, for reasons that could never be anticipated or controlled. All right, so first of all, we have the awareness of the inevitability of death. Secondly, we have the realization that we could die at any time. And thirdly, just to give us a little psychological kick in the groin, just to dump one more giant turd in your psychological punch bowl. What Becker points out, is that we also don't like the fact that we're animals. You guys are young but has anybody seen the Elephant Man movie? Do you know that movie? Anybody seen The Elephant Man? Okay, so remember in that movie where the elephant man dude says, I am not an animal, and you're just like, oh man, I'm with you, Monsieur Pachyderm, but the fact is, you're wrong because you are an animal. Like it or not, you are essentially just like any other biological entity. A breathing piece of defecating meat, no more significant or enduring than a lizard or a potato. And, the point that Becker makes is that human beings are tremendously discombobulated by those three facts. I will some day die, I can die at any time, and I'm a breathing piece of defecating meat. A cold cut with an attitude. Spam with a plan, but I've got no can. And that all of those things would literally paralyze us with abject terror. So Becker is speculating that back in the old days, that humanity had an existential crisis. And that what we did quite ingeniously, although very likely quite unconsciously, is to attempt to minimize or eradicate the anxiety that's engendered by the uniquely human awareness of death, by the construction and maintenance of what today anthropologists would call culture. All right, so Becker's definition of culture, and I think anthropologists are generally on board with this, is that culture consists of humanly constructed beliefs. About the nature of reality that we share with other people in our group, in part and I emphasis, in part, to reduce the anxiety that is a result of the awareness of death. It's important to emphasize the in part thing. Culture does a lot of other things. And we, today, just want to consider the psychological and behavioral implications of one of the central foundations of culture. It is to enable us to stand up every day by giving us a sense that we are persons of value, in a world of meaning. So let's now talk about what I just said, that culture gives us the sense that we live in a meaningful universe, and that we as individuals contribute in a significant or valuable way to that universe.
