Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

by Susan Cain

Our nervous systems make little distinction between our own pain and the pain of others, it turns out; they react similarly to both. This instinct is as much a part of us as the desire to eat and breathe.

Darwin is associated, in the popular imagination, with bloody zero-sum competition, with Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw”—with the motto “survival of the fittest.” But this wasn’t actually his phrase. It was coined by a philosopher and sociologist named Herbert Spencer and his fellow “social Darwinists,” who were promoters of white and upper-class supremacy. For Darwin, says Keltner, “survival of the kindest” would have been a better moniker. Darwin was a gentle and melancholic soul, a doting husband and adoring father of ten, deeply in love with nature from earliest childhood.

Indeed, when the Dalai Lama heard about this aspect of Darwin’s work, he was astonished by its similarity to Tibetan Buddhism. (“I will now call myself a Darwinian,” he said.) Both Darwinism and Buddhism view compassion as the greatest virtue, and the mother-infant bond as the heart of sympathy. As the Dalai Lama put it, in a dialogue with the University of California, San Francisco, psychology professor emeritus Dr. Paul Ekman, “In the human mind, seeing someone bleeding and dying makes you uncomfortable. That’s the seed of compassion. In those animals, like turtles, not dealing with a mother, I don’t think they have a capacity for affection.”

How then to achieve humility (especially if you find yourself in a relatively fortunate socio-economic position)? One answer is to practice the simple act of bowing down, as the Japanese do in everyday social life, and as many religious people do before God. This gesture actually activates the vagus nerve, according to Keltner. “People are starting to think about the mind-body interface in these acts of reverence,” he explained in a 2016 Silicon Valley talk.