Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith - Hardcover

Vaillant, George E.

 
9780767926577: Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0767926579 ISBN 13: 9780767926577
Verlag: Broadway Books (A Division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc), 2008

Inhaltsangabe

In our current era of holy terror, passionate faith has come to seem like a present danger. Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have been happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare that the danger is in religion itself. God, Hitchens writes, is not great.

But man, according to George E. Vaillant, M.D., is great. In Spiritual Evolution, Dr. Vaillant lays out a brilliant defense not of organized religion but of man’s inherent spirituality. Our spirituality, he shows, resides in our uniquely human brain design and in our innate capacity for emotions like love, hope, joy, forgiveness, and compassion, which are selected for by evolution and located in a different part of the brain than dogmatic religious belief. Evolution has made us spiritual creatures over time, he argues, and we are destined to become even more so. Spiritual Evolution makes the scientific case for spirituality as a positive force in human evolution, and he predicts for our species an even more loving future.

Vaillant traces this positive force in three different kinds of “evolution”: the natural selection of genes over millennia, of course, but also the cultural evolution within recorded history of ideas about the value of human life, and the development of spirituality within the lifetime of each individual. For thirty-five years, Dr. Vaillant directed Harvard’s famous longitudinal study of adult development, which has followed hundreds of men over seven decades of life. The study has yielded important insights into human spirituality, and Dr. Vaillant has drawn on these and on a range of psychological research, behavioral studies, and neuroscience, and on history, anecdote, and quotation to produce a book that is at once a work of scientific argument and a lyrical meditation on what it means to be human.

Spiritual Evolution is a life’s work, and it will restore our belief in faith as an essential human striving.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

George E. Vaillant, M.D., is a psychoanalyst and a research psychiatrist, one of the pioneers in the study of adult development. He is a professor at Harvard University and directed Harvard’s Study of Adult Development for thirty-five years. He is the author of Aging Well and The Natural History of Alcoholism, and his 1977 book,Adaptation to Life, is a classic text in the study of adult development. He lives in Boston; East Thetford, Vermont; and Victoria, Australia.

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1
Positive Emotions


Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, let me sow forgiveness;…
Where there is doubt, let me sow faith;
Where there is despair, let me give hope…
Where there is sadness, let me give joy;
O Master, grant that I may not so much to seek
compassion but to give compassion.
—“The Peace Prayer of St. Francis” attributed to Father Esther Becquerel (1912)


Just as a prism separates white light into a spectrum of discrete colors, so this book separates spirituality into a broad spectrum of positive emotions. By focusing on the positive emotions, I wish to perform for spirituality what the science of nutrition has performed for the world's discordant diets. Just as nutrition identifies the vitamins and the four basic food groups that make other people’s peculiar ethnic diets nourishing, so neuroscience, cultural anthropology, and ethology identify the love, community building, and positive emotions that enduring religions have in common.

Here’s a true story told by Jack Kornfield, a clinical psychologist. Traveling by train from Washington to Philadelphia, Dr. Kornfield found himself seated next to the director of a rehabilitation program for juvenile offenders, particularly gang members who had committed homicide.

One fourteen–year-old boy in the program had shot and killed an innocent teenager to prove himself to his gang. At the trial, the victim’s mother sat impassively silent until the end, when the youth was convicted of the killing. After the verdict was announced, she stood up slowly and stared directly at him and stated, “I’m going to kill you.” Then the youth was taken away to serve several years in the juvenile facility.

After the first half year the mother of the slain child went to visit his killer. He had been living on the streets before the killing, and she was the only visitor [in jail] he'd had. For a time they talked, and when she left she gave him some money for cigarettes. Then she started step by step to visit him more regularly, bringing food and small gifts. Near the end of his three-year sentence, she asked him what he would be doing when he got out. He was confused and very uncertain, so she offered to help set him up with a job at a friend’s company. Then she inquired about where he would live, and since he had no family to return to, she offered him temporary use of the spare room in her home. For eight months he lived there, ate her food, and worked at the job. Then one evening she called him into the living room to talk. She sat down opposite him and waited. Then she started, “Do you remember in the courtroom when I said I was going to kill you?” “I sure do,” he replied. “I'll never forget that moment.” “Well, I did,” she went on. “I did not want the boy who could kill my son for no reason to remain alive on this earth. I wanted him to die. That’s why I started to visit you and bring you things. That’s why I got you the job and let you live here in my house. That’s how I set about changing you. And that old boy, he’s gone. So now I want to ask you, since my son is gone, and that killer is gone, if you’ll stay here. I’ve got room, and I’d like to adopt you if you let me.” (1) And she became the mother he never had.


Her compassion! Her forgiveness! Where did they come from? We can all identify with the woman's primal growl of “I’m going to kill you.” And when, in her living room, she reminded her boarder of what she had said in court, I feared what would come next. But then I was surprised. For Hindu and Jew, for Buddhist and Christian, that moment would have been equally moving, but this story lacked even a hint of “religion.” What had happened? Unselfish love had conquered both Darwinian “selfish” genes and Kantian pure reason. The transformative power of positive emotion had interceded.

Positive emotions—not only compassion, forgiveness, love, and hope but also joy, faith/trust, awe, and gratitude—arise from our inborn mammalian capacity for unselfish parental love. They emanate from our feeling, limbic mammalian brain and thus are grounded in our evolutionary heritage. All human beings are hardwired for positive emotions, and these positive emotions are a common denominator of all major faiths and of all human beings.

Thus, this is, in some respects, a revolutionary book. I shall argue that the positive emotions are not just nice to have; they are essential to the survival of Homo sapiens as a species. In Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio, a sensitive clinical neurologist and arguably the wisest student of emotions on the planet, convincingly argues that the mind and the body are one. However, he concludes, “it is difficult to imagine that individuals and societies governed by the seeking of pleasure, as much as or more than by the avoidance of pain, can survive at all.” (2) If readers will permit me to define pleasure as the result of positive emotion rather than mere hedonism, then Damasio is in error. This book summarizes scientific evidence—gathered over the fourteen years that have elapsed since Damasio made his assertion—suggesting that positive emotions are very important indeed. As noted in chapter 6, by the year 2003 Damasio too had softened his position.

As the twenty-first century begins, a great many people—especially in the English-speaking world—are in search of some kind of common spiritual ground. On the one hand, increasing education and intolerance for patriarchal dogma have led to steady erosion in membership in most mainstream religions. On the other hand, this shift toward secularism has been offset by an equally steady increase in fundamentalist religions that isolate their believers from the rest of the world. As a result, contemporary culture holds no universally accepted view of human nature. If the world is going to function as one small planet, the development of some kind of consensus regarding human nature is essential. That consensus should include the recognition that human nature is more than a bunch of "selfish" genes.


Recently, I tentatively began to discuss spirituality with a close friend of mine, a brilliant woman and a devout Episcopalian to boot. “When I hear the word 'spirituality,'” she exploded, “I break out in spots!” I was surprised to hear her voice her sentiment so strongly, but to her spirituality was no more than illusion. The problem, of course, is that the word “spirituality” has many meanings. While spirituality is both the source and the outgrowth of faith for many people, for just as many others it is considered suspect. For them, spirituality is equated with the occult and with bogus faith healers; it brings to mind reincarnation, telepathy, crystals, angels, and tarot cards. To others, spirituality can appear as nothing more than covert narcissism and a new-age mandate to follow your bliss. I believe these mind-sets to be terribly mistaken.

True, we may have trouble defining spirituality, but we all know and admire it when we see it. Let me mention three men who would be on most people’s list of spiritual exemplars. For reasons embedded in our evolving genes, it is likely that the behaviors of three forgiving and compassionate leaders, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mohandas Gandhi, will remain in memory and continue to shape human behavior.

This book defines spirituality as the amalgam of the positive emotions that bind us to other human beings--and to our experience of “God” as we may...

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Verlag
Broadway Books (A Division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc)
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767926579
ISBN 13 
9780767926577
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
238
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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