Beauty At Work
Beauty at Work expands our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters. Sociologist Brandon Vaidyanathan interviews scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders across diverse fields to reveal new insights into how beauty shapes our brains, behaviors, organizations, and societies--for good and for ill. Learn how to harness the power of beauty in your life and work, while avoiding its pitfalls.
Beauty At Work
Yearning For Meaning with Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren and Dr. David McPherson (Part 2 of 2)
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Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. This search is at the heart of religions all around the world. Over the past century or so, however, religion, especially in the West, has been in decline, and many commentators have marked the rise of the “nones” and “dones”--those who have no religious affiliation and those who have abandoned religion with no intention to return. What factors are behind these shifts? What does the search for meaning in the absence of religion look like? What is spirituality and what is its relevance in our contemporary context? In this episode, I interview a psychologist and philosopher who are trying to make sense of these trends.
Daryl Van Tongeren, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Hope College and the director of the Frost Center for Social Science Research. A social psychologist, he has published more than 200 scholarly articles and chapters, and four books, on topics such as religion, meaning in life, and virtues. Most recently, his work has focused on the psychological and social processes of leaving religion and undergoing religious change, culminating in his newest book, Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion. His research has been covered by numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, BBC, Hidden Brain, Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR-affiliated radio stations, Scientific American, and Men’s Health. His work has been supported by numerous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, and he has won national and international awards for his research. He is also an associate editor for The Journal of Positive Psychology. He enjoys running, biking, and hiking near where he lives with his wife, Sara, in Holland, MI.
David McPherson is Professor of Philosophy in the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida as well as Affiliate Professor in the Department of Philosophy. McPherson works in the areas of ethics (especially virtue ethics), political philosophy, meaning in life, and philosophy of religion. He is the author of The Virtues of Limits (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2020), as well as the editor of Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2017). McPherson is currently the project leader for a three-year Templeton-funded grant project on “Spiritual Yearning and the Problem of Spiritual Alienation,” which will result in his third book monograph titled Spiritual Alienation and the Quest for God as well as an edited volume titled Spiritual Yearning in an Age of Secularization: Philosophical, Psychological, and Sociological Perspectives.
In this second part of our conversation, we talk about:
- The Search for Meaning and Spiritual Yearning
- Spiritual Alienation and the Struggle for Authenticity
- The Role of Yearning in Psychological Growth
- The Existential Challenge of Living Fully
- Spiritual Practices and the Path to Receptivity
- The Future of Spirituality in a Secular Age
To learn more about Daryl and his work, you can find him at:
Website: http://darylvantongeren.com/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/darylvantongeren/
X: https://x.com/drvantongeren
Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion: https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/done
To learn more about David and his work, you can find him at:
Website: https://davidmcpherson.weebly.com/
X: https://x.com/davidlmcpherson
Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective:
I think that the only pathway to authentic flourishing is through an acceptance and a real engagement with existential realities. I think a lot of psychological dis-ease, a lot of defensiveness, a lot of interpersonal conflict, intradroup turmoil, ideologically motivated violence stems from our inability or unwillingness to see existential concerns as the realities they are. And so if we could work together personally and collectively to embrace these existential realities as truths and not threats, as facts and not fears, I think that you would be transformative because that's the only way to fully appreciate what it means to be a bounded human and then make decisions in light of that to engage in a full and flourishing life.
SPEAKER_02I'm Brandon Vidanathan, and this is Beauty at Work, the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty, what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust. Hey everybody, this is the second half of my conversation with psychologist Daryl Van Tongren and philosopher David McPherson about spiritual yearning. Please check out the first part if you haven't already. So far, we've talked about Daryl's research on the duns of people who have left religion, and David's work on alienation. In this episode, we're going to talk about the data on spiritual yearning among the duns, how we make sense of those who say they don't experience such yearnings at all, and why we need to take our existential concerns more seriously. Let's get started. Daryl, I wanted to ask, like, what do you what do you think of alienation as a way to conceptualize what's happening when people encounter these sort of four horsemen? And uh you have a concept of the existential chasm in your book. Could you talk about how that relates to this notion of alienation?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, absolutely. So I think in part, besides cognitive dissonance being kind of the a major reason why people are leaving, in another sense, it could be that they they're no longer feeling as though their religion is meeting their needs. And they're somehow feeling alienated from their religious teachings or institutions or from other religious individuals. And so the process of leaving religion for those who are undergoing a major belief revision that's landed them outside of traditional religion, I introduced this idea of the existential chasm, and it goes something like this. So religion addresses a lot of core existential needs. What's the meaning of life? What happens to me after I die? When people leave religion, they have to answer those questions again without religion. And so they're facing these new existential fears afresh without being able to rely on religion to provide them with ready answers. And so there's two kind of unique things about this. One is if they've previously known what it was like to, let's say, believe in the afterlife, and maybe that's a belief that they've jettisoned, that that didn't, you know, that's going to bring about a whole lot of grief. Because if you comforted yourself by losing a loved one or a friend by believing that they would live on in the afterlife and you no longer believe that, you might be grieving them again. And if you've oriented your life around where to go to college, what profession to choose, whom to marry or partner off with based on your religious beliefs, and now you no longer hold those, you might grieve having spent so much of your life in so many major life decisions oriented around something that you no longer believe. So you're facing these new existential challenges in a brand new way, no longer having the structure of religion, but knowing what it was like. And then the second piece is for many people who are raised religiously, they may not have developed the skills or the capacities or the habits of critically thinking about how to engage these existential concerns on their own, because they might have been given a kind of a complete comprehensive worldview through religion to address these concerns. And so there's this, there's this gap. So existential anxiety is likely heightened among people who have left religion because they can't rely on or are no longer relying on religion to meet those needs, and they're facing them once again. And so for these folks, existential concerns are going to loom larger and they might feel like they don't have much of a place to turn and they feel more alienated and alone.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. What is so how does one respond to that? I mean, you talk about cultivating some kind of spiritual practice as one route. And are there is is that something that people long for? And I suppose maybe the question that you could also ask is, you know, in the aftermath of leaving religion, is there a kind of yearning, you know, or or you know, or do people shut it off and say, I'm just going to live my life according to something else?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you know, in some of our in some of our recent work with colleagues, what we're finding is that, yeah, people are are yearning. So we've done some work with religious duns and people who've never been religious, and we ask them, you know, are you looking for something more? And among those, yeah, they've got mild yearnings, and and they're kind of looking for a few things. So one of the things they're looking for is something that looks and seems like and feels like religion, but isn't religion. So basically something to replicate what religion gave them, but without the costly parts of religion. They're looking for connection with other people, right? They're looking for that community. They're also looking for transcendent connection and lasting meaning. Like they want to know that whatever they're doing here is gonna be remembered and is gonna make a difference over the long term. And then the last thing they're really yearning for are these supernatural experiences. And religion offers those. And outside of out, you know, outside of religion, it's really hard to get some of those supernatural experiences, which you know, David alluded to the idea that maybe that's why we're seeing this uptick in in interest in psychedelics, is maybe, you know, is it this way to quickly get to supernatural experiences without, in some cases, traditional religious structures? I similarly share the belief that spiritual yearning is probably just as natural as a desire to make meaning. So to the degree that we're trying to make sense of the world around us and our place in the world, we're natural meaning makers. And one of the deepest and most enduring ways that you can make meaning is by connecting with something larger than yourself. And that's really this feeling or sense of transcendent spirituality. So yeah, when people leave, it's not as if they no longer have spiritual needs or long for something larger than themselves. They're probably just looking for it in different areas.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, how how much do you do you think that the people who uh yeah, who leave religion really need to cultivate some kind of spiritual practice? Is that necessary? Is it, you know, are these sorts of needs that they, you know, once could find answers for in religion important? You know, is it basically is this a universal human quality that we we ought to pay attention to?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that that that's a great question. Uh you know, there are other sources of spirituality besides religion. So I think of spirituality as that relational connection of the transcendent or divine or sacred. And religion's one of the vehicles through which people can experience spiritual connection, but they can experience it in nature, through the cosmos, through uh, you know, connecting with other humans, through an authentic and sense of integrity within themselves. So I do think that there are features that allow for spiritual connection or transcendence, but should we be cultivating these, right? Or should we, you know, is it an important thing? I I would say probably so. I I I don't and people are going to have different perspectives on this, and there's gonna be individual differences and variation, but I don't think that we should neglect or let wither something that has has long been a part of human flourishing across millennia, across cultures. There's always been this notion of the spiritual, of something larger than oneself. And I do think that's uh important to attend to and important for us to consider not letting what let wither, but instead how do we cultivate some type of spiritual practices that will meet those needs, even if it looks different from how it's previously been done in traditionally organized religious settings.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. There might be people who I know you know we've encountered some scientists who say, look, I don't I don't care about spirituality, I don't care about I don't even know what you mean by connection when you ask me that question. Right. Um what do you what do you think of that kind of like is it possible to be completely sort of tone-deaf to the spiritual or just not need it at all and still live a flourishing life?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you know, I certainly think that there are people for whom what we're talking about just is absolutely of no interest to them, or they they don't really spend much of their day thinking about these types of questions. And probably by every kind of measure and metric, they would probably report their lives probably just fine. Like it's meaningful enough. They've got work if they're able to, they've got relationships, if you know, they like labor relationships, maybe they have a hobby. So they have things to fill their time, um, and and they they probably have things that make their life quite meaningful. And one might imagine, though, that even richer sense of meaning might be available to those who are willing to cultivate a sense of spirituality. But I would not presume that a lack of spirituality means that someone is living necessarily in a deficit.
SPEAKER_02David, what do you think? In in terms of you know, as human beings as meaning-seeking creatures, you know, is is the sort of response of someone who says, Look, I don't need this stuff, how do you make sense of that? Is it just that there's enough scaffolding that they don't have to confront themselves with universal questions that percolate from within us, or is that just that there is, you know, is there a viable way of living a human, like a maybe a life of fullness that doesn't require dealing with these existential questions?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's a great question. I want to add one thing just kind of on the spiritual alienation bit, because I think it connects up with this. I think it's helpful to distinguish between spiritual alienation and religious alienation. So I think, you know, for instance, a lot of Daryl's work is on what I might call religious alienation. So people who are like done with religion or sort of in some way alienated from religion. And one of the interesting questions is like, does that make the spiritual search more difficult? Does it exacerbate the sort of fundament more fundamental spiritual alienation that sort of I argue we all have, right? I mean, a great example of this is Nietzsche's when he proclaims the death of God. He sort of describes two experiences. One is a kind of, I might call it existential vertigo, where it's like which way is up, which way is down, you're trying to find an orientation in life, right? Trying to find a meaningful life orientation. And then the second experience is at least he describes as a more positive one, which is this experience of like an open sea of like possibilities that sort of like you're liberated from certain kinds of restrictions. So for some people, they may actually find it, find it easier, right, if they're sort of throwing off some baggage from their past, although they're sort of tasked with this like which path then, right? And I do think, I think spiritual practices do play an important role just as vehicles of our longing, right? They're ways of expressing, you know, whether it's prayer or meditation or whatever it might be, I think that they play an important role as vehicles of our longing. Now, this I I do find this question very interesting of like the person who like says that they don't have any spiritual longings. Like, I don't I don't even know what you're talking about. So like Max Weber famously, you know, he said that he was religiously unmusical, that he just, you know, in other words, he didn't resonate with sort of like religious or spiritual questions. But nevertheless, when he was like asked like why he does his work, uh, he said, I want to see how much I can stand, right? It's sort of this image of like uh this courageous person facing the bleakness of reality and carrying on nevertheless, right? And so I think I think oftentimes there are these sources of meaning. So even if they don't like, even if they don't find any larger meaning in the cosmos, they may find personal meaning just in sort of confronting this. Now, of course, there are cases of like people who just go through their lives and maybe don't reflect on it too much, right? But this is sort of that midlife crisis experience that can come up. Like you might think just you know, being human, like there's just questions that are going to arise sooner or later, right? You come up against some failure in your life, or you come up against mortality, or you come up against a tragedy and suffering. You're trying to make sense of it, right? And so this is a sense in which, like, while people might not frame it as like spirit, like some of it's the framing of like spiritual longing, right? But you might switch to like thinking about meaning, right? So another way to think about like spiritual yearning is just to talk about in terms of like the search for meaning. And I do think we are fundamentally meaning-seeking creatures, and we we s we seek meaning in lives, we want our lives to be significant, we want our lives to matter. So I think in that sense, sometimes you just have to frame the reference. I mean, like spirituality can sound spooky to people, like it can sound like you know, ghosts and goblins and whatnot, right? I mean, so it's like yeah, it's like what like and people are maybe of a more kind of like you know, spirit or soul or whatever then that they may not I mean, partly I just think of it as this this realm, what you might call, as one philosopher John McDowell calls it, the space of meaning, right? We we live in the space of meaning. We sort of swim in it, we're already in the midst of it. So in that sense, I think if we reframe it as like search for meaning or search for fullness, I think as you you did yourself, I think it's more easier to see how that's kind of a universal human quest. So sometimes I think it's the language or the baggage associated with certain language that can can hold us up. But maybe there are people like, I don't seek meaning, I just I just wanna I I sometimes I'll use this what I call the Jim Morrison position, uh the lead singer of the doors at the end of in their live album at the end of uh Roadhouse Blues, he's talking about like, you know, astrology and all these sort of things. He's like, I don't believe in it though, I think it's a bunch of bullshit. I tell you this, though, I'm gonna get my kicks in before the whole shit house goes up in flames, right? And it's sort of this like he's just gonna he's just gonna seek pleasure, right? And so that would seem to be like example of like if someone's just kind of living more, you might call like in a non-human animalistic kind of way, but it's not even clear that that's fully possible. You know, I mean uh Kierkegaard will talk about this with his account of the estate, the person lives for the kind of immediacy of the moment. And the problem is you get bored and you sort you begin to reflect upon your life. And so uh while not all the time are we always engaged in sort of meaning-seeking activities or like what we might call spiritual yearnings, I think I think they have a way of cropping up. And sometimes I I think like thou dost protest too much when people are like, I don't, I don't, I'm religiously unmusical. Like clearly, like Weber, for instance, was very moved by and attuned to the sort of hard, big questions. I mean, he's the one who sort of coined the term the disenchantment of the world, right? And how do we go on in science as like you know, in the face of like disenchantment, right? So he I would say he's he's a person very alive to what we might call spiritual or existential questions. So maybe existential could be, and Daryl, I know uses this framing as well, sometimes existential. So I I think you sometimes it's how you frame it, I guess, is how I would put it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I I wonder at times whether you know we we build we build lives to inoculate ourselves from these questions because they're they are pesky, right? They they have a way of erupting. And we these aren't questions that I mean, or maybe some of us could sit around and sort of ask these questions in a kind of laconic way, but that's not how often they crop up, right? They they there seems to be, you know, a kind of yeah, it's almost like you know, I have this image of even like uh a plant sort of shooting up from hard rocky ground, right? So it's almost when the cracks in our narratives, you know, in our societal narratives or our personal narratives start to reveal themselves, or we've got some kind of breakdown in our routines and habits, and unexpected tragedies are often the ways in which some of these things might crop up, and then we have to either really shore up a defense against these questions in some way, or or just try to live, live them. The question of yearning becomes interesting because the yearning has a kind of it's not just a pesky question, but then there's also this longing, there's almost desire, right? That's that's built into it. And there is David, you know, you were familiar with this Seinfeld clip, right, where which which which we shared at the at the convening we were at a few months ago where Kramer sidles up to George and asks him if he ever yearns, and George says, Well, yearn, well, you know, I crave sometimes. And and and you know, can we live can we live lives that are entirely lives dedicated to following cravings but not not yearning? And is that, you know, is that a reasonable account of fullness to just pursue craving?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. No, that's that's a great question. Because I was thinking about this when you were mentioning your your Buddhist scientist friend earlier, because of course the Buddhist, you know, like teaching is like the problem of selfish craving, right? But it doesn't necessarily, I mean, there's ways I think of reading the Buddhist tradition as like totally allowing for yearning, right? Like this, we're trying to achieve this state of nirvana, right? We yearn for it, where we're not sort of consumed by sort of selfish craving, where we're acting more compassionate, more in tune with the world in some way, right? And so I think we have to distinguish between like kinds of desires. There's like, you know, those a petitive kind of like maybe selfish cravings, the sort of thing that maybe uh Jim Morrison was talking about when he wanted to get his kicks in, right? But then there's like the yearning, which I think, I mean, sometimes that language can sound overwrought, you know, like, oh, I yearn, you know, like, and so some people may like may react to the the overwroughtness of the the sound of I yearn for this, right? But I think it's usually, I mean, it's hard not to see it as involving this strong normative dimension. Like we yearn, if we put it maybe in like platonic terms, like for the good or for the beautiful, right? I'm thinking of your your podcast name here, right? Reflecting on beauty, right? That calls out a deep longing for uh from us, right? Um, this sort of reaching out to something, some mode of existence where we feel like we'll be more as we should be, or you know, have that experience of fulfillment or a deeper sense of meaning in life. And so there is this like nor more strongly, like normative dimension to to to yearning or long. We we feel in a way called or like drawn to it in some way, right? It's different than craving, right? I mean, like it's like you have a craving, you know, you have a like desire to scratch an itch, right? I mean, but that's different from like longing for like connection with your spouse or you know, with with others around the world or with nature. Uh, there's some sense we feel called or drawn into some deeper sense of goodness, of purpose. Um and I I think it is in, I mean, longing is another term, you know, it comes from like comes from a German German root so that sort of like means like lying in and like reaching out, right? It's like kind of reaching out. I think it goes back to like that experience of like loneliness too. It's like a reaching out for something that we think would fulfill us. And so I actually think it's hard to like completely articulate it because it has this open-ended quality to it when we yearn for something. We're not quite sure, but we think something's maybe missing. It's like when we have that experience of something maybe missing in our lives that we we yearn for something, right? And we yearn for that deeper connection with others, with the good, however we want to describe it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. There's um philosopher of aesthetics, Crispin Starkwell, who argues that he defines beauty as the object of our longing. Whatever it is we're longing for, that's what beauty is. And that's an interesting kind of way of characterizing beauty. And I'm curious to know, maybe Darrell, like, what do you think psychologically the valences of of these yearnings are? And I don't know if you've already seen this in your research, but is it is it oriented towards something that one could call beauty? And also, is there, do you see any kind of personality dimension? Like, are there are there some personality types that yearn more than others?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, so we were actually quite curious, like, are these yearnings a good thing or a bad thing, right? Like if I'm yearning, maybe it's a deficit, but maybe if I'm yearning, it's well, I want I want to grow in some way. So far, the early returns on the data suggest that yearnings are seen as mildly positive. So it's not bad. So when people are experiencing yearning, uh this isn't this isn't a an aversive thing. Um so that's that's one thing we've realized. Um we haven't yet gotten into the personality features. We want to, that's on our it's on our list. So stay tuned for that. I don't want to speak ahead of the data. I I could make some predictions, but um, we're still not quite there. But I would be quite curious to see if there are if there are people that are more naturally inclined to yearn, right? If perhaps if they're higher in openness to new experience, for example, we might imagine they might be more um likely to yearn. But we're not quite sure yet. The data, the data aren't there.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I have you know an image of of like you know, a light a life that is driven by yearning versus versus you know its its various other alternatives. I mean, certainly one would be the kind of maybe scaffolded life where where one is insulated from this, which I'd mentioned. An alternative might be, or maybe this is also a form of the scaffolded life, but it's a it's a caricature of Jay Nostin's sort of world of you know restrained people, like Victorian England or something of that sort, where you you you if if you look at the life of yearning as say a you know Sufi mystic or like a desert father or one of those people living out this deep spiritual yearning, you could you could see these other modes of life perhaps as as being alternatives that that for some are compelling, or at least, you know, one could say there's a virtuous life being lived out in the Victorian mode. I don't personally find that a really I don't know, um I it seems that it requires so much social scaffolding to be able to construct that sort of life that it seems anyway, psychologically sort of a not really a sustainable project. And somehow if we could figure out how to better confront and encounter and deal with these existential questions, it might actually serve us better. But that might be my prejudice. I don't know. Daryl, what do you think as a psychologist in terms of thinking about fullness from a psychological perspective?
SPEAKER_04So I could not agree with you more. I could not agree with you more that I think that the only pathway to authentic flourishing is through an acceptance and a and a real engagement with existential realities. I think a lot. A lot of psychological dis-ease, uh, a lot of defensiveness, a lot of interpersonal conflict, intragroup turmoil, ideologically motivated violence stems from our inability or unwillingness to see existential concerns as the realities they are. And so if we could work together personally and collectively to embrace these existential realities as truths and not threats, as facts and not fears, I think that it would be transformative because that's the only way to fully appreciate what it means to be a bounded human and then make decisions in light of that to engage in a full and flourishing life. Otherwise, we're just reacting, we're being defensive, we're trying to skirt the issue or avoid the fact that we have to encounter these fundamental features of being human. We're running from and trying to elude our human-boundedness. And I think embracing it is the only pathway to flourish.
SPEAKER_02Do you have recommendations for how one would go about doing that? What could that look like?
SPEAKER_04Well, it's not it's not easy. Um I think uh I think a big reason why we've evolved these complex and sophisticated psychological defense mechanisms is it's rather terrifying. And I think, Brandy, I think you mentioned it that, you know, I think suffering and adversity have a way of thrusting these existential realities into the forefront of our minds. And it's it's harder to avoid. You know, one of the recommendations is when people experience adversity, suffering, when they encounter the harsh realities of the existential concerns, that they use that time to really engage with them and start seeing them for what they are and start accepting them. It's much easier to do in the comfort and luxury when you're feeling, you know, when life is more settled and you're not undergoing, you know, the maelstrom of stress and adversity. But we also we often don't seek that out because we don't want to psychologically rock the boat. You know, Irvin Yalum has a book called Staring at the Sun, and it's kind of coming to terms with, for example, like death. And so it's basically like we have to habituate ourselves over time to these types of realities. And so, you know, there's there's been work on, for example, terror management theory, which suggests that reminders of death make people really defensive. But then what they found was these trends are reversed among older adults. And the reason for that was because they were thinking, well, they're just more habituated in the reminders of their own mortality. Their friends are dying, they're thinking about it. So the more we talk about and can actually embrace these existential uh concerns, I think the more habituated we will come and become, and the less defensive and reactive we will be. So having these conversations, actually engaging in them in in times of calm and peace, but also in times of suffering and adversity, the more we have these conversations and the more people are willing to take the hard look, the more willing, the more able they will become to move toward acceptance rather than defensiveness.
SPEAKER_03Thank you. David, what do you think? Yeah, I was thinking, so um, you were asking about humility earlier, or you mentioned it as we might come back to here. And so I think uh, you know, Daryl mentioned uh acceptance and sort of brought me back to mind of uh the the my most recent book is called The Virtues of Limits. And I talk about these what I call two fundamental existential stances. One is the accepting appreciating stance, and the other is the choosing controlling stance. And I think both are actually really important in human life, and the sort of trick is how to get it right. Uh if you go like too far in acceptance, it just becomes a kind of quietism, right? Where you just sort of like let things lie, you know, you don't try, you know, you don't try any kind of change or improvement in one's life. The other, the choosing-controlling stance we take up whenever we seek improvement, but it can also become this kind of Promethean project of mastery, right? It can also be going back to kind of what you were saying, Brandon earlier, about trying to insulate yourself, right? So I think humility is really important because I think it sort of acknowledges that um it's a sort of proper recognition of our of our place in the world. And I think it's actually really closely connected with reverence, that there are things of value beyond ourselves, maybe even of greater value. So it helps to define your proper place in the scheme of things, so to speak. But I think I think humility also allows for a kind of proper receptivity. So I think, I think one of the things that we need to cultivate as a, I mean, I think we we think a lot in sort of modern American culture about individual choice and control and so forth, but cultivating like a posture of receptivity is much more difficult. And I think if you look at a lot of the sort of ancient spiritual practices, a lot of them involve what practices of receptivity, whether that's like prayer or meditation, contemplation, right? And so I think that's really the one of the greater challenges. I I'm brought to mind of like Pascal's remark that, you know, sort of the the great sort of uh besetting condition is that we don't know how to like sit quietly alone in our rooms, right? Uh we're always sort of trying to constantly distract ourselves. It's a sort of expression of our sort of spiritual predic predicament, trying to avoid, I mean, I kind of back to your comment about insulating ourselves, right? We're really good at distracting ourselves, and our modern technologies have made that all the more easy, right? And so it's to try to cultivate modes of receptivity or sort of proper responsiveness to the sort of the good and the beautiful and the true that's all around us, I think is is one of the real challenge. I mean, you know, like you think of Matthew Crawford's book, The The World Outside of Your Head, the sort of issue of attention, which, you know, you see that in Iris Murdoch or Simone Vey. This this issue that attention is a really important part of the spiritual life and it's a receptive mode of being. It's kind of, you know, Simone Vey talks about waiting on God. We could talk about like waiting for the good or the beautiful, trying to be receptive to like what comes to us. And so, so in that sense, I think it is kind of like a a spiritual, a spiritual task to learn how to be properly attentive or receptive to sort of the you know the existential realities that are all around us. We could again, we can try to ignore them. I mean, that's what that's why we distract ourselves. But it does seem like sooner or later we come up against them, so why not just work on dealing with them now rather than being sort of caught off, caught off guard, so to speak. But you know, we're probably still will be caught off guard because because that's that's the human condition. But yeah, no, I I think yeah, it gets to I think something really important and connects with this issue of humility that I think is really important.
SPEAKER_02It seems that attention becomes incredibly incredibly fraught resource uh in in a in a world in which there's there's so much uh monetary incentive to colonize our attention, right? And so there are lots of powers that stand to gain from from you know fracking our attention, as D. Graham Burnett puts it. So it's um it's a tough, it's a tough battle. Uh, what questions do you guys have for each other? I know, I know you're all are in conversation with as part of uh your own project on this, but is there is there anything that comes up that you want to want to ask?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, we've been talking for a bit, uh, and it's it's been wonderful. I think I've just been very interested in the empirical side sort of um that that Daryl looks at with you know the the people who are duns or nuns, like what what are their experiences? Do they I mean, so I think Daryl already touched on some of this, do they have spiritual longings? Maybe one in the moment would I mean so I mentioned, you know, sort of from my philosopher's armchair, I kind of have this sense that there's challenges and opportunities, I guess, with in terms of spiritual yearning and spiritual, you know, seeking meaning. There is that, you know, go back to Nietzsche, that sort of sense of disorientation that can arise. And I think Daryl touches on that with the existential chasm. Uh, but maybe also that side of spiritual possibilities. Daryl, do you find that like that there's a sense, you know, that people feel like there's these spiritual possibilities that things are like sort of opened up to them in a way? Or is it like maybe like almost too much choice? I mean, this is something Taylor talks about in a secular age, sort of the optionality of different perspectives. Like we can almost feel like paralyzed and like not knowing where to go, which path to choose. Uh what do you see on that, Daryl?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, I I I mean, I I think you're absolutely right. So I do think that there are these twin, right? It's it's kind of those twin feelings again of awe and dread, right? It's the twin feelings of grief and and and sadness and and fear, but also awe and wonder and curiosity. So I kind of think about it as when they're in the existential chasm, there's this sense of being untethered. And for some people who are you know high on a growth orientation, that feels great. And it feels good to have the world of possibilities. But for those who are high in security orientation, being untethered feels very groundless and that feels very anxiety-provoking. And sometimes we can have both of those feelings within us just depending on the context. And so, yeah, there I think that there's a there's a combination of possibility and concern, of anxiety and curiosity, of wonder uh and of fear. Wonder and fear sometimes are very closely, there's a thin line between those two. Uh, and I think that's one of the areas we're seeing that. Um yeah, David, I I guess just for you, you know, my one last question, David, would be um, what do you see as the future if you're if you're seeing an increasing spiritual alienation, if you were to prognosticate, what would you see moving forward?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so I would I mean I don't think religion's gonna go away, for instance. I mean, I think they're just sort of tried and true practices, and they also meet needs for human belonging. So I don't I wouldn't accept going back to sort of like the death of God view of secularization where like religion's just gonna completely fade away. And in fact, I mean just on like birth rates alone, I know Pew has sort of estimated the world's getting more religious, just not maybe in like America or or Europe. But yeah, it's hard to predict the future. Uh uh prognostication is not typically my my forte, but I I think we can expect, I mean, if it is true that we are sort of meaning-seeking creatures, we are and we we s we have a spiritual predicament. I mean, I think this the great spiritual traditions are always gonna offer sort of pathways. And I think for belonging, for spiritual practices that sort of orient us towards the good. But I think, you know, I think oftentimes what we'll have is people, Robert Wethnow has this distinction between seekers and dwellers. And so I think I think we do have a world of seekers, but I think even dwellers are going to be uh are gonna be seekers as well. So you might call it kind of a seeker-dweller conjunction that that people like they may sort of have eclectic spiritual practices, they may sort of inhabit a spiritual tradition, but seek from seek from out of that, you know, spiritual or religious tradition. And so I think I think spiritual seeking is is going to continue. And I think um, I mean in some ways I think that what the data suggest on like the rise of the nuns is that I mean, some of what you have is sort of like low practicing, the amount of like people are like you know, like very serious in their practice is maybe roughly, roughly the same, but um, but it it may even decrease decrease more. I mean, that certainly has happened in Europe, so it's hard to prognosticate. But kind of going back to your points, religions have addressed these existential concerns. And so it's hard to see the great religions as sort of completely being eradicated. I think they may be, their numbers may be less, but they're gonna be there as sort of resources for for people who are spiritually seeking. And so I just don't think spiritual longing or seeking is gonna go. I think that's what I feel most confident saying, is that it's not going away. Uh, it's just part of the human condition. And I think because traditional religions are sort of, you know, tested practices and they've been helpful for people, sometimes not helpful, but oftentimes helpful as well. I think they'll continue to have a role in human life, even if maybe somewhat of a reduced role than it has been in the past. That's my best prognosis. I'm not gonna give you numbers or percentages or uh, perfect. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. No, that's that's it's super important to think about. And I think especially yeah, in a context in which you know there's there's a lot of incentives for you know various entities to to prey on all of our longings and yearnings, right? And whether for belonging or or to to to connect with others, et cetera, and um to cultivate healthy forms of you know, healthy responses to those yearnings becomes really really critical. So we'll direct our our leader readers and listeners to your websites. And is there is there anything else you want to anything else you're working on that's coming out that you want to draw uh people's attention to? I don't think so.
SPEAKER_04I mean, no, just yeah, I appreciate you directing them to our books and uh and your readers and listeners will know that uh you know we uh we're both working independently but also collaboratively on some work on spiritual yearning. So hopefully in the next couple years we'll be able to report back on what the future holds.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, thank you, Brandon. It's been been a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, for me too. Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it. Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you. All right, folks, that's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks and see you next time.