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June 26 - August 21, 2025
Should we in the West try to return to a more virtue-based morality?
Just watch movies from the 1930s and 1940s and you’ll see people moving around in a dense web of moral fibers: Characters are concerned about their honor, their reputation, and the appearance of propriety.
For many liberals, diversity has become an unquestioned good—like justice, freedom, and happiness, the more diversity, the better. My research on morality, however, spurred me to question it. Given how easy it is to divide people into hostile groups based on trivial differences,36 I wondered whether celebrating diversity might also encourage division, whereas celebrating commonality would help people form cohesive groups and communities. I quickly realized that there are two main kinds of diversity—demographic and moral.
Franklin proposed creating a “United Party for Virtue.”
God created the angels from intellect without sensuality, the beasts from sensuality without intellect, and humanity from both intellect and sensuality. So when a person’s intellect overcomes his sensuality, he is better than the angels, but when his sensuality overcomes his intellect, he is worse than the beasts. —MUHAMMAD2
With the wrong metaphor we are deluded; with no metaphor we are blind.
The metaphor that has most helped me to understand morality, religion, and the human quest for meaning is Flatland, a charming little book written in 1884 by the English novelist and mathematician Edwin Abbot.3 Flatland is a two-dimensional world whose inhabitants are geometric figures. The protagonist is a square. One day, the square is visited by a sphere from a three-dimensional world called Spaceland. When a sphere visits Flatland, however, all that is visible to Flatlanders is the part of the sphere that lies in their plain—in other words, a circle.
In all human cultures, the social world has two clear dimensions: a horizontal dimension of closeness or liking, and a vertical one of hierarchy or status.
has led me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists. In reaching this conclusion, I lost the smug contempt for religion that I felt in my twenties.
galaxy of new microbes and parasites, most of which are contagious in a way that plant toxins are not:
Disgust was originally shaped by natural selection as a guardian of the mouth:
Animals that routinely eat or crawl on corpses, excrement, or garbage piles (rats, maggots, vultures, cockroaches) trigger disgust
Disgust plays a role in sexuality analogous to its role in food selection by guiding people to the narrow class of culturally acceptable sexual partners and sexual acts. Once again, disgust turns off desire and motivates
the human body is a temple that sometimes gets dirty, it makes sense that “cleanliness is next to Godliness.”
When people think and act using the ethic of autonomy, their goal is to protect individuals from harm and grant them the maximum degree of autonomy, which they can use to pursue their own goals.
When people use the ethic of community, their goal is to protect the integrity of groups, families, companies, or nations, and they value virtues such as obedience, loyalty, and wise leadership.
Political representation
I found that educated Americans of high social class relied overwhelmingly on the ethic of autonomy in their moral discourse, whereas Brazilians, and people of lower social class in both countries, made much greater use of the ethics of community and divinity.
the highest peak of divinity—the Lingaraj temple itself—I was not even allowed to enter the compound, although foreigners were invited to look in from an observation platform just outside the walls. It was not a matter of secrecy; it was a matter of contamination by people such as me who had not followed the proper procedures of bathing, diet, hygiene, and prayer for maintaining religious purity.
We ourselves can be gods or demons. It depends on karma. If a person behaves like a demon, for example he kills someone, then that person is truly a demon. A person who behaves in a divine manner, because a person has divinity in him, he is like a god. . . . We should know that we are gods. If we think like gods we become like gods, if we think like demons we become like demons. What is wrong with being like a demon? What is going on nowadays, it is demonic. Divine behavior means not cheating people, not killing people. Complete character. You have divinity, you are a god.
The borders between the sacred and the profane must be carefully guarded, and that’s what rules of purity and pollution are all about. Eliade says that the modern West is the first culture in human history that has managed to strip time and space of all sacredness and to produce a fully practical, efficient, and profane world.
these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.
the six “basic” emotions23 known to have distinctive facial expressions: joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise.
studying elevation in the lab.
Nerves have accomplices, however; they sometimes work with hormones to produce long-lasting effects, and the vagus nerve works with the hormone oxytocin to create feelings of calmness, love, and desire for contact that encourage bonding and attachment.
Growing up Jewish in a devoutly Christian country, I was frequently puzzled by references to Christ’s love and love through Christ. Now that I understand elevation and the third dimension, I think I’m beginning to get it. For many people, one of the pleasures of going to church is the experience of collective elevation. People step out of their everyday profane existence, which offers only occasional opportunities for movement on the third dimension, and come together with a community of like-hearted people who are also hoping to feel a “lift” from stories about Christ, virtuous people in the
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The soul escapes the body only at death; but before then, spiritual practices, great sermons, and awe at nature can give the soul a taste of the freedom to come.
Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence.
Krishna gives a detailed and abstract theological lecture on the topic of dharma—the moral law of the universe. Arjuna’s dharma requires that he fight and win this war. Not surprisingly (given the weakness of reason when it comes to motivating action), Arjuna is unmoved. Arjuna asks Krishna to show him this universe of which he speaks. Krishna grants Arjuna’s request and gives him a cosmic eye that allows him to see God and the universe as they really are. Arjuna then has an experience that sounds to modern readers like an LSD trip. He sees suns, gods, and infinite time. He is filled with
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(The ethic of community, which stresses the importance of the group over that of the individual, tends to be allied with the ethic of divinity).
Only by knowing the kinds of beings that we actually are, with the complex mental and emotional architecture that we happen to possess, can anyone even begin to ask about what would count as a meaningful life.
“Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live in harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”
Once the Holy Question has been re-framed to mean “Tell me something enlightening about life,” the answer must involve the kinds of revelations that human beings find enlightening.
There appear to be two specific sub-questions to which people want answers, and for which they find answers enlightening. The first can be called the question of the purpose of life: “What is the purpose for which human beings were placed on Earth? Why are we here?” There are two major classes of answers to this question: Either you believe in a god/spirit/intelligence who had some idea, desire, or intention in creating the world or you believe in a purely material world in which it and you were not created for any reason; it all just happened as matter and energy interacted according to the
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Aristotle asked about aretē (excellence/virtue) and telos (purpose/goal), and he used the metaphor that people are like archers, who need a clear target at which to aim.13 Without a target or goal, one is left with the animal default: Just let the elephant graze or roam where he pleases.
The two questions can, however, be separated. The first asks about life from the outside; it looks at people, the Earth, and the stars as objects—“Why do they all exist?”—and is properly addressed by theologians, physicists, and biologists. The second question is about life from the inside, as a subject—“How can I find a sense of meaning and purpose?”—and is properly addressed by theologians, philosophers, and psychologists.
Why do some people live lives full of zest, commitment, and meaning, but others feel that their lives are empty and pointless? For the rest of this chapter I will ignore the purpose of life and search for the factors that give rise to a sense of purpose within life.
But people are not computers, and they usually recover on their own from almost anything that happens to them.15
But the amazing thing I learned about plants is that as long as they are not completely dead, they will spring back to full and glorious life if you just get the conditions right.
you can only give it the right conditions—water, sun, and soil—and then wait. It will do the rest.
If people are like plants, what are the conditions we need to flourish? In the happiness formula from chapter 5, H(appiness) = S(etpoint) + C(onditions) + V(oluntary activities), what exactly is C? The biggest part of C, as I said in chapter 6, is love. No man, woman, or child is an island. We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can’t be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people. The second most important part of C is having and pursuing the right goals, in order to create states of flow and engagement.
Love and work are, for people, obvious analogues to water and sunshine for plants.17 When Freud was asked what a normal person should be able to do well, he is reputed to have said, “Love and work.”18
people and many other mammals have a basic drive to make things happen.
The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, “Joy’s soul lies in the doing.”22
Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right. Happiness comes not just from within, as Buddha and Epictetus supposed, or even from a combination of internal and external factors (as I suggested as a temporary fix at the end of chapter 5). The correct version of the happiness hypothesis, as I’ll illustrate below, is that happiness comes from between.
As market forces were reshaping many professions in the United States during the 1990s—medicine, journalism, science, education, and the arts—people in those fields began to complain that the quality of work and the quality of life were sometimes compromised by the relentless drive to increase profits.
It’s a matter of alignment. When doing good (doing high-quality work that produces something of use to others) matches up with doing well (achieving wealth and professional advancement), a field is healthy.
Here is one of the most profound ideas to come from the ongoing synthesis: People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence.
So every time you make an offering to God, the three levels of your existence are all aligned and mutually interlocking. Your physical feelings and conscious thoughts cohere with your actions, and all of it makes perfect sense within the larger culture of which you are a part. As you make an offering to God, you don’t think, “What does this all mean? Why am I doing this?” The experience of meaningfulness just happens.
Once again, happiness—or a sense of meaningfulness that imparts richness to experience—comes from between.
You can’t just invent a good ritual through reasoning about symbolism. You need a tradition within which the symbols are embedded, and you need to invoke bodily feelings that have some appropriate associations. Then you need a community to endorse and practice it over time.
