The Examined Life
The Examined Life podcast explores the questions we should be asking ourselves with a range of leading thinkers. Each episode features a different interview, and appeals to those interested in wisdom, personal development, and what it might mean to live a good life. Topics vary from discussing the role of dopamine mining and status anxiety, to exploring the science of awe and attention.
The Examined Life
Alex Evans - What do we do about the religion shaped hole?
What do we lack when we lack religion? In this episode Alex Evans explores the role that religion has historically played in both collective and individual life, and the shape it leaves behind when it disappears. The stories that we locate ourselves within and the rituals they enshrine, are formative in the way we attend to the world. Religion has historically provided the structure for this work, and its absence leaves a vacuum. The conversation explores the various pretenders to the religious throne, any why many of them fall short.
Alex works at the intersection of where the state of our minds meets the state of the world, and the way these influence one another. His organisation Larger Us is seeks to drive positive change address the crises of our day by bringing people together, you can find out more on their website - www.larger.us.
We are living through increasingly apocalyptic times, and I mean that not in the sense of the end of the world or of a zombie apocalypse, but more in the kind of in the literal sense, of apocalypses being moments where things get revealed. And I think that the idea that we're going into apocalyptic times without those institutions to help us navigate them, to help us navigate them, that's really going to increase the premium on finding new forms of doing this collective self-help. That's both inner and outer, new stories and so on. All of that's going to become incredibly important. I think the idea that we can navigate this long crisis that we're all living through just through means of kind of policy and changes to taxation regimes and more multilateral cooperation or whatever I mean yes, we need all of that, but there's also this vital inner dimension to navigating big moments of crisis, and that's the bit that I think we're really going to have to move quickly to figure out how we're going to approach that.
Speaker 2:Growing up in a Scottish city. Over the last three or four decades I experienced what many across Europe will have experienced. I watched as the churches which once dominated the skyline and high streets of our cities were turned into nightclubs, pubs and flats or fell into disrepair. The shells of these churches remained, but the functions of those buildings changed. In some ways, this is an apt metaphor for the way people have been disaffiliating from religion for the last few decades. There's a shape, a footprint, on both the collective and the individual level, that religion has left as it picked up its coat and was shown the door. What that religion-shaped footprint is and what we do with it is the subject of today's conversation with Alex Evans.
Speaker 2:Alex is a fascinating guest who is hard to pigeonhole. He's written books, worked for the UN Secretary General's office, worked as a special advisor to two Secretary of States for International Development. He's currently visiting professor at Newcastle University's School of Arts and Culture and a senior fellow at New York University's Centre for International Cooperation. He is also founder of the organisation Larger Us, which he currently runs. This works at the intersection of where our states of mind meet the state of the world. Suffice to say, Alex is a man of considerable talent and experience, and it was a joy to speak to him for the Examined Life podcast.
Speaker 2:I hope you enjoy the episode as much as I enjoyed the conversation. Alex, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. I've been really looking forward to this conversation. Much of your work has been driven by a desire for change on significant and sometimes existential issues like climate change. Your organization, Larger Us, which I'm sure we'll discuss, works at the cusp of where our inner world meets the outer world and how these influence one another, and so I'm wondering whether there is a question that emerges for you at this moment or it has been driving the work that you're doing.
Speaker 1:The one that's most on my mind these days is what we do about what I think of as the religion-shaped hole in modern society, in modern life, and what I mean by that is that I think, historically, religions at their best big caveat there have performed various roles that lie at the intersection of our inner and outer worlds that turn out to be really important, especially right now and with religious affiliation tanking in real time in countries all over the world. We're not sure now whose job this is and we can get in a bit more to the sort of specific roles that religion at its best has historically played. But I think there's just a really big question about who picks up this mantle. I think you know psychology is one pretender to the throne. This mantle I think you know psychology is one pretender to the throne.
Speaker 1:I think various forms of activism are another. I think that the huge growth in so-called spiritual but not religious practice is a third, and I think each of those has really interesting stuff to bring to the table. But each of them also ultimately falls short of being a total solution to what we do with the religion-shaped whole. So this is just a question I keep coming up against in my work and I'm endlessly fascinated by it, and I don't know the answer either.
Speaker 2:I can very much resonate with the question as someone who's also endlessly fascinated by religion. I think it was Nick Spencer who said that any word which can accommodate both the Quakers and Al-Qaeda is just a bit too baggy to be useful, and so perhaps we could begin by exploring what it is you mean by religion. And more specifically, I suppose, as culture secularises, what do you notice about the shape that religion leaves behind, both individually and collectively?
Speaker 1:Well, I suppose the first thing to say is that religions are obviously human institutions and in that sense they can be really great or they can be really terrible. I remember years ago having lunch with Karen Armstrong, the great writer on religion, who observed to me that religion is a lot like sex, that when it's good it's just the most beautiful connecting thing in life, and when it's bad it can be really really awful and abusive and all of the rest of it. And so, yeah, I mean that sort of stays with me in terms of thinking about religion, which is why I have that caveat about religions at their best. But I think that, you know, over time, religions at their best have performed various roles which turn out to be really important, not just for our own personal psychological, spiritual well-being, but also for the good of the societies that we live in. And I'm thinking here of how, for example, religions have historically been able to give us tools for managing our mental and emotional states, everything from prayer to meditation to Stoic philosophy. They've provided congregational spaces in which we can feel that we belong and that we're valued in our communities, but that also show us what we have in common, in spite of all of the things that make us different from each other. Obviously, religions have been institutions that have curated and propagated really deep stories that give us a sense of where we are, where we might be trying to get to, who we are and so on, especially important in times of upheaval and turbulence. And I'm also really interested in how often religions have been the soil from which movements for change have sprung. I mean, I'm a lifelong Labour Party member and in lots of ways you know, the Labour movement grew out of Methodism.
Speaker 1:You think of the abolition of slavery movement in the 19th century or in the 20th century, gandhi's Satyagraha movement, or in the 20th century, gandhi's Satyagraha movement, or the civil rights movement in the US, all the way up to things like Jubilee 2000 within the last quarter century, which obviously achieved extraordinary things in terms of cancelling developing world debt. And you know these are important roles and I think you know each of these aspects has this fascinating theme of how it's partly about what goes on inside us, in our minds, in our psychology, in our behaviours and so on, and partly what happens out there in the world. They in that sense sit right at the cusp of psychology and politics, which is what our work at Larger Us is all about, too psychology and politics, which is what our work at Larger Us is all about too. And now, with religious disaffiliation falling, or rather accelerating so quickly, as I said before, it's just, you know, we're not sure where those roles sit in society, but they turn out to be really important.
Speaker 1:And when you look at the kind of hyperpolarization that we see in the United States, the growing issue of mistrust in public life, the you know really steeply falling numbers of people who express faith, hope, confidence in the future, this is all stuff where, if we don't have religion, then you know we need some other institutions to perform those roles, but you know which ones. Where do we look for that? So that's the question I keep coming back to.
Speaker 2:It's fascinating and I'd love to dive into it a bit more, both why people are disaffiliating from religion and what options there might be for replacing it. Years ago I remember reading an essay by the philosopher John Gray called Sex, Atheism and Piano Legs. In it he was comparing the way that Victorian sexual habits became perverted because of that natural desire for sex being suppressed, and similarly, under communism, religion was suppressed and the religious urge came out in perverted forms like belief in some kind of utopian society or our current belief in kind of technological progress. Stories like this seem to have failed. They haven't kept their believers, not in great numbers. So I wonder where you see the future of the stories that have grounded us. Do they lie in creating new ones, like communism did, or technological progress, or returning to those stories and religions that many people thought they had outgrown or left behind or didn't seem plausible any longer?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, first I don't want to lose track of the aspect of your question about why people are disaffiliating from religion, because I think it is worth teasing out that it's often for very good reasons. I mean, I'm not here as a cheerleader in an uncritical way for religion, saying oh it's so bad that we're less religious, because I mean, actually I think we're in this very interesting moment where lots of terrible harms over a very long sweep of history are kind of all bubbling up into our collective consciousness. So, for example, the ways that religions have been complicit in literally millennia of sexism and repression of women, in centuries of colonialism, in slavery and so forth. There's the way that religions, I think, are often seen as combining self-righteousness and dogmatism with a terrible shadow side, including too many sexual abuse cover-ups to count.
Speaker 1:And then, obviously, the many, many forms of fundamentalism that have been erupting in pretty much all major religions and the ways those are playing out in terms of extremism and terrorism and conflict and so on and so forth. So I think that the fact that people are disaffiliating from religion, I mean, there's important stuff to work through. There are good reasons why people are disaffiliating and I don't want to sort of shy away from that. But then, in terms of you know the stories that religions used to provide and what happens now, that we are not buying into those perhaps as much as we used to, I mean, this is stuff that I started thinking about when I wrote a book called the Myth Gap, which came out a few years back now, in 2017. And one of the ideas that really preoccupied me at the time was how, in that gap, where we don't have those shared stories that we used to use to make sense of the world and our place in it, it does create an opening for all sorts of bad stories that divide us rather than bringing us together to fill the gap. One example, obviously, is the myth that the marketing industry propagates that you are what you buy and that that's the path to kind of self-fulfillment and happiness and status in society and so on. Then you have the them and us narratives that populists like Donald Trump propagate in that gap, you know, tremendously resonant at this point. And then obviously you have the kind of rash of conspiracy theories that we see all around us at the moment, and so I think you can really see the hunger for stories that exists, and when kind of the right kind of stories aren't available, all sorts of gunk can fill the gap. But I suppose you know, as we touched on a minute ago, really one of the thoughts that's been in my mind since writing the Myth Gap is that the religion-shaped hole is so much bigger than just the lack of shared stories that there are all these other aspects, whether it's, you know, the tools for managing mental and emotional states or the places for belonging and other things too.
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm fascinated by how religions are sometimes, you know, charged with helping us to navigate experiences of shared loss. I mean, you see that very prominently in the Bible, for example and you know the book of Lamentations, to take an obvious example that sort of supports and facilitates a profound process of collective grieving after a catastrophe, and I think it's really interesting how, when you don't have the mechanisms in place for that kind of collective grieving, grievance can fill the gap. Instead. There's a really interesting psychiatrist and conflict mediator called Vamik Volkan, and this is what his work is all about how, when societies experience a big shared loss, like the loss of an empire and the loss of kind of self-respect that comes with that, or losing in a war Think of kind of Germany after World War I, for example when you have a manipulative leader who's skilled at preying on that experience of shared loss, they can very easily turn it into grievance in ways that become cornerstones of group identity.
Speaker 1:And this is not just an abstract or historical observation. It's absolutely what you see with Trump the idea of making America great again. You know, it used to be great, it isn't now. It's all about a sense of loss. Or if you look at how Putin went to war in Ukraine, again it was all about feeding on this sense of loss that so many Russians have experienced. And you know when he first started nibbling at Ukraine's eastern border back in 2014, it was enormously popular because it spoke directly to that sense of shared loss. So that's another example of how you know religions have historically had important roles and all sorts of bad things can happen when those roles are not adequately filled by somebody else if religions are declining.
Speaker 2:That's a fascinating connection. I'd never heard that the absence of a vehicle for processing grieving becoming grievance. I also sometimes wonder if it's the same in terms of growing up to maturity, a very protracted kind of adolescence into adulthood with no clear markers. Whereas you know Judaism, you've got bar and bat, mitzvahs and so on and these rites of passage that help you hold on to the stage in life that you're at, and without that we feel, I suppose, adrift, and like that word adrift seems to come to mind a lot when we think of where we are in this current moment.
Speaker 1:I totally agree. One of my favourite essays, which is from years ago now, is by a man called Michael Ventura, who was a Rolling Stone journalist and co-wrote a wonderful book with James Hillman, the Jungian psychotherapist, called We've had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and Things Are Getting Worse, which I think puts its finger on something really important. But he wrote an essay just on the eve of the millennium called the Age of Endarkenment, and right at the heart of it was the idea that we are living in this kind of liminal moment at which all sorts of, as you say, quite adolescent themes are floating around, both in the collective unconscious and, you know, in the real world and kind of politics and so on, and in society the way that you know, we, so you know you look at kind of culture or fashion we're constantly looking to sort of adolescent themes as the kind of wellspring. And what he argues very forcefully in this essay is that we've just got this complete failure on the part of the adults to offer initiatory structures to mark that threshold from adolescence to adulthood. And he has this really bold claim that in the absence of those initiatory structures, young people have no option but to use history itself to initiate themselves, which is this crazy gripping idea which I find endlessly fascinating and it's just.
Speaker 1:It's a very interesting one and I like the idea that we are living in this kind of liminal, initiatory moment. There's a guy called Dwayne Elgin, who's writing I like, and he has this nice habit that in his travels all over the world he asks this little straw poll of people that if humanity were a single person, would it be a baby, a child, a teenager, an adult or someone in their senior years and in society after society, all over the world you typically get between two thirds and three quarters of people just instinctively saying that we're in our teenage years. So it seems to make a kind of intuitive sense to people.
Speaker 2:I mean that's fascinating. I wonder what stages in history the answer might have been different. When you know, if we went back to romanticism or something like that, would people say, yeah, we're, we're kind of in the blossom of middle age or uh, I don't know. I mean, when you, when you, when you think historically, when you look back to the best, let's say the best of religion or the best of a kind of societal and human flourishing, is there anything you look at with? You know a degree of?
Speaker 1:that's a pattern I'd like to recreate for now, yeah, Well, this is a slightly different take on the question, but I mean, the thing that really stands out for me about when religions are most important across the grand sweep of history is that they're most important in cataclysmic moments because they can speak to the depth of those moments, the depth of the sense of crisis, of things falling apart, the depth of suffering and so forth of things falling apart, the depth of suffering and so forth. When I was writing the Myth Gap, one of the things that really struck me is that periods of enormous breakdown and turbulence, when no one's sure what they can rely on or take for granted or what on earth is going to happen, those are fertile moments for mythic renewal. I mean, I think you know you look at something like China's Warring States period, which is full of cataclysmic renewal. I mean, I think you know you look at something like China's Warring States period, which is full of cataclysmic events. It's also the period that gave rise to Taoism and Confucianism. Or you think about the Black Death in Europe, you know third, of the population dying off and then shortly afterwards you get the Renaissance and then the Reformation and the Enlightenment in short order after that, and you look at the 20th century and the disaster of the Second World War, the Holocaust, the first use of atomic weapons, and then, shortly afterwards, you get the emergence of the United Nations and universal human rights and so forth.
Speaker 1:And so that feels I mean the last one obviously is not religion, but it is a form of mythic renewal in a way nevertheless, and that feels really relevant, because I think we are living through increasingly apocalyptic times, and I mean that not in the sense of the end of the world or of a zombie apocalypse, but more in the literal sense of apocalypses being moments where things get revealed.
Speaker 1:And so, for example, covid-19 was a revelatory moment which showed us who the real key workers in society are and how much we depend on each other for the connections that make life meaningful, and so forth. And I think that, yeah, the idea that we're going into apocalyptic times without those institutions to help us navigate them, that's really going to increase the premium on finding new forms of doing this collective self-help that's both inner and outer, new stories and so on. All of that's going to become incredibly important. I think the idea that we can navigate this long crisis that we're all living through just through means of kind of policy and changes to taxation regimes and more multilateral cooperation, or whatever I mean. Yes, we need all of that, but there's also this vital inner dimension to navigating big moments of crisis, and that's the bit that I think you know. We're really going to have to move quickly to figure out how we're going to approach that.
Speaker 2:So you've approached it within larger us to some extent through psychology, because you can kind of it's to a large degree and you can keep everybody in the room. It doesn't have the baggage of religion and so on. Um, but yeah, I guess I'm curious if you're talking about religion shaped whole, then to what extent does it, does it fit it? I'm I'm interested in the fact that, um, jordan Peterson talks a lot about Jungian psychology but has ended up in the mystical realm to some degree. I mean, arguably that was always there, but the same with Ian McGilchrist. The last chapter of his his tomb is on a sense of the sacred. To what extent do you think one goes into psychology to find the answers and ends up in the kind of the apophatic and the mystical and so on? I mean, is that what you're Super?
Speaker 1:interesting question. So I mean I suppose. So I should explain first of all what Larger Us is. I mean, this is a startup that I set up in 2018. And basically, what we do is draw on psychological research to try and design change-making and campaigning strategies that bring people together rather than dividing them.
Speaker 1:And this really grew out of two experiences that I had in 2017. One was running a big campaign in the UK to oppose Brexit. This was when I was working for AVARZ, the big global kind of campaigning organization, and I was just very aware about the toxic polarization that had opened up on Brexit and uncomfortably aware that my work at best, wasn't helping to heal that divide and might, at worst, in some ways be contributing to it. So that was one thing that planted the seeds, but the other thing was spending a lot of time watching Cambridge Analytica, if you remember them, and you remember, their prospectus was basically that they could mash up psychological profiling of lots and lots of people together with social media targeting, and they argued that through the combination of those two things, they could, in effect, weaponize our own anxieties against us just when it matters most during elections and that that could even influence the outcome of those elections. And this fascinated me because, for one thing, it made me think how would you inoculate against this deliberate kind of trolling, whether you're inoculating an individual or a community or even a whole society, how would you protect against this kind of dynamic? And then it also made me wonder could you use psychology to do the opposite, to bring people together rather than dividing them?
Speaker 1:And I was very aware, not just from my work on Brexit but just in campaigning world generally, there's almost a conventional wisdom that any good campaign will always have a really resonant villain at its heart. Think of kind of climate campaigners. You know you want to have a really nasty fossil fuel company or something to aim at. So there is a risk that the campaigns that are resonant, that get your supporters fired up, that get media coverage and so on, do rest at their heart on creating a them and us. And I was interested in could you still have resonant campaigns but that create a larger us rather than a them and us? So that's the question at the heart of our work and, as you say, the way we've always framed this has been in terms of psychology rather than religion or spirituality, et cetera, and that is partly because you know. Notwithstanding that, I think this question about the religion-shaped toll is really pressing and we do talk explicitly about that in the trainings that we run at Larger Us. I thought that you know, if we badge any of this as overtly religious or even spiritual, that's going to put lots and lots of people off. And we wanted this to have broad appeal because we think all of us are holding these questions about how do we achieve a them and us rather than a larger us. They are relevant to everybody in society right now, given the kind of political dynamics that we're seeing.
Speaker 1:But I suppose that, five years in, I am increasingly aware of the limitations of a purely psychological approach to that and I suppose really what it comes down to is a sense that ultimately, most of psychology's focus is on the individual as the unit of analysis. Psychology is primarily concerned with individual well-being therapy. I mean, of course Psychology is primarily concerned with individual wellbeing Therapy. I mean, of course there is group therapy, but most therapy is still kind of one-to-one Medication obviously, which is the main intervention we have for mental ill health is also, you know, it's given to individuals, and what I struggle with there is well, what about the idea that psychology is not just an individual proposition. I mean there's something too individualized about seeing well-being purely as something that's kind of personal. I think well-being is often collective and we need collective forms of self-help and we need collective forms of self-help. And so where that's led us in our work at Larger Us, which I should say started life as a thing called the Collective Psychology Project, I mean, you know, from the get-go we had this sense of psychology has the missing collective aspect.
Speaker 1:But I'm really interested in three, if you like, feedback loops, three dynamics that feel really relevant to this point that we're all living through. One is the way that the state of the world affects our states of mind, and this is something that Johan Hari writes about brilliantly in his book Lost Connections. So I mean, as he describes, not so very long ago, if you had chronic depression or anxiety and you went to see a doctor about it, it might easily have said oh, don't worry, this is just an imbalance in your brain chemistry, and here's some Prozac to redress that balance. And now I think we have a much better sense of all of the ways in which, of course, the state of the world affects our states of mind If you're living in constant grinding poverty, of course that's going to affect your state of mind. And if you look at where depression is most concentrated in the United States, it's in areas with very high poverty. Or if you are on the receiving end every day of racist or homophobic abuse, of course that's going to affect your state of mind. There's lots and lots of examples. If you're kind of living through a climate crisis, as we're increasingly realising, and seeing kind of wildfires and extreme weather and all of the rest of it, of course that's going to affect your state of mind. So that's one dynamic the state of the world affects our states of mind.
Speaker 1:The second one is that our states of mind affect each other through the whole phenomenon of social contagion. We all know how giggling or yawning can be infectious, but of course that's true of emotions and states of mind as well. So you see the dynamic of how things like self-harm or suicide ripple through social networks, and all of this is being massively amplified by the hyper-connectedness of living our lives online massively amplified by the hyper-connectedness of living our lives online. And then the third one and this is where I think things get really interesting is how our states of mind affect the state of the world because they define how we show up as citizens. And the kind of proof of this is look at a MAGA rally. Look at how Donald Trump is deliberately creating a kind of fight flight freeze response among his audience, because that just makes them ripe for the picking in terms of his brand of divisive politics. Or look at how extremist groups like the Proud Boys or Hizb ut-Tahrir prey on people who are looking for belonging. They're very, very good at it. So all of these things matter, very, very good at it. So all of these things matter.
Speaker 1:And you know, we talk at Larger Us about how this can create a vicious circle where the state of the world is getting worse. That makes us feel more anxious, depressed, hopeless. That affects how we show up as citizens in more divisive ways lots of othering and so forth and that reduces our capacity to cooperate to solve the problems we're up against. So the thing we're most interested in at large is how do you reverse the polarity of that cycle so that the state of the world begins to get better, we feel more open, more confident, more hopeful, and then we act in more pro-social ways. That amps up even more our capacity to solve the problems that are coming at us. That feels like the biggest challenge that we're up against right now.
Speaker 2:It sounds like an enormous challenge and I love hearing your thinking on it, alex. The problem seems to be one of scale. How do you scale it? So you have pockets of people who are interested in deeper stories and contemplation, spiritual practice and changing the way we do life, though the attention economy holds so many people hostage, pinning them into an algorithm and a consumerist economy.
Speaker 1:So I'm wondering whether you think it's possible to change the message and praxis of mainstream culture and where you see signs of that changing and hope for the future yeah, I think you put your finger on the core question in all of this, because of course you know, when you look at individuals, there are lots of individuals at the moment who do find the kind of, you know, fast food of stuff on our smartphones. It's like a sugar rush and ultimately it is unsatisfying. Of course it is, and so there's lots of kind of hopeful trends about, for example, I mean, look at the growth of meditation over the last 50 years, how that's become really mainstream. I think there is an appetite for depth. Or, you know, in the myth gap I was talking about how, yes, religious affiliation was declining. You know back then, same as now. But you can really see the appetite for deep stories in the kinds of things that top the bestseller list or um or the box office charts. I mean, look at some of the stories that have kind of uh, really seized the popular imagination just in the last 10 or 15 years. Think of the kind of lord of the rings or the narnia books, um, as they've been made into films, his dark materials, and these are really deep stories that do have things to say about the human condition, and I think it shows that that appetite is still there.
Speaker 1:But what you're asking about in that question, which I absolutely agree, is the core question is but how do we scale this up in time if individuals are seeking out forms of depth that slow things down and center themselves in ways that clearly the kind of you know, doom-scrolling attention economy does not? We need that to be happening at really large scale in order to move the political needle and change the kind of course that we're on towards a more sustainable and hopeful future. And how is that going to happen? That is the question, and I don't have a neat answer to it. I mean, the issue that I have spent most time working on over the last 20 years is climate change. That's the issue I know best, and so I know very well from working on that that when you look at the data on global emissions which, by the way, is still increasing how much you know the weather effects we're seeing now are resulting from emissions. You know years ago so already there's so much more global warming baked in, even if emissions went to zero tomorrow the lack of political will that we see all of that it's very hard to find rational reasons to be hopeful.
Speaker 1:And this is where I need to come back to something you touched on in your introduction. I mean, I guess for me personally, this is where I find myself relying on kind of non-rational bases for hope. What a religious person might call grace, or you know, somebody who wasn't religious might just call a sense that you know, at some level the universe is for us rather than against us, which is an article of faith. But I do have that faith and so that keeps me hopeful. I think that you know it is kind of always darkest just before the dawn and things are dark at the moment, but I do nevertheless have a lot of faith in our ability to kind of rise to that moment and that at deep level you know we are a species that crave depth and connection and love, a species that crave depth and connection and love, and I think ultimately those things will out. But I think it's going to be a sort of pretty choppy period while we find our way there.
Speaker 2:You're listening to the Examined Life podcast with me, kenneth Brimrose. Today I'm in conversation with Alex Evans. My hope for this podcast is that it might offer some nourishing food for thought, that will encourage reflection and, ultimately, that these conversations might help us to find a compass in a dizzying and disorientating world. If you're enjoying them and you can take a minute, then do please rate and review the podcast on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also sign up for my Substack newsletter called Positively Maladjusted. It's where I try to make sense of these insights. I've been encouraged to hear that some people really value these emails, and perhaps you will too. Substack also offers an easy platform for supporting financially If that's something you feel you want to do and are able to do. Any support is hugely appreciated, as is all of your feedback. We're going to return now to the second part of this conversation with Alex Evans, where we unpack a bit more about the religion shaped whole.
Speaker 2:You mentioned several books that have been really popular in recent decades so Pullman's Dark Materials or Harry Potter or Narnia or whatever and I think what's interesting about them is that they are about enchanted realms.
Speaker 2:They speak, I think, to some basic desire to see our own realm as enchanted, but many of us in the West have been schooled in a reductive way of seeing the world that flattens it and makes it feel disenchanted, which I think in a sense goes against some of our experiences of life and our intuitions on some level.
Speaker 2:In your book, the Myth Gap, you talk about the fact that some myths, or that myths generally motivate and change behavior, as opposed to data, which doesn't seem to have the same power. The church forest in Ethiopia is a good example of this, where the Afromontane forests are looked after because of spiritual beliefs in stewardship of the planet. Where I'm going with this is that there's clearly a hunger for stories and enchantment, and these do have the power to change the way we attend to the world, which is exactly what the environmental crisis needs at the moment, as well as various other crises. However, to many people, these stories don't seem plausible or believable. They are in the realm of fiction and for them to have power, don't they need to feel true? Don't they seem to need to be plausible? For, you know, the work of larger us to take root in changing behaviours, do we need stories that we can get behind as stories that are kind of truly descriptive about the world.
Speaker 1:I love that. Okay, so I think believable is right.
Speaker 1:They do have to be believable, but it's worth unpacking what we mean by that, and this is another thing that I kind of riffed on in the myth gap where observed, sorrowfully, that if you look up myth in the thesaurus you find it in the same entry as words like bunk and crock and fabrication. And I think this is part of the reason that we have a myth gap that we've in our kind of modern, rational, literalistic times. We have held myth to the same standard as scientific truth, um, and we're like well, it's not literally true in the scientific sense, so it's completely false, it's nonsensical. You know, when we talk about an urban myth we mean something that's nonsensical and I think that's that's to hold myth to the wrong standard entirely. I mean this is, you know, karen Armstrong would say this is where fundamentalism emerges from. In religion that, you know, you get people who, as they see religious disaffiliation proceeding apace, try and defend religion by saying no, no, it's literally true. You're trying to use modernity's kind of standard of truth back against your detractors. It doesn't work. It takes you to all sorts of bad places and I think it's a bit like I think you mentioned Ian McGilchrist earlier something different, something that speaks to our hearts at a more kind of intuitive level, and I think you know where you began with your question there. Re-enchantment is a lovely way of putting that. That's what we're all kind of thirsty for.
Speaker 1:One of the kind of you know, most defining moments really in my life in wanting to do this work was this hilarious moment at a conference I went to in 1999 in Brussels and it was all about I was working as a lobbyist at the time and the conference was called Scenario Planning in Public Affairs and it was really interesting. And there was this one particular presentation by a guy called Mark Leuchts who was the head of forward studies of kind of futures work within the European commission, and he stood up and more or less the first thing he said in his talk was that the prime and I'm quoting here, the prime public policy objective of our times is re-enchantment of the soul. I was completely electrified. I had no idea you could get away with saying something like that in a sort of, you know, sensible policy conference. But he sort of went on to talk about how you know we're in this what he called sort of well, a postmodern phase right now, a sort of flatland where we're not sure what's true, what's important. It's all kind of relativistic. And his question was how do we find our way through to you know what he called the sort of transmodern, so not the old hierarchies of sort of you know religion, nor the flatland of postmodernism, but a sort of you know, a re-enchantment that has a fusion, ultimately, of unity and of diversity.
Speaker 1:I just thought this was the most fascinating thing I'd ever heard and just thought how do I get to do this kind of work when I grow up? And I think it leads coming back to the religion-shaped holly, it leads to a really interesting question in all of this, which is about I mean, I mentioned at the beginning the sort of important roles that religions at their best have historically played, and they're things that are really valuable for society. They're important for kind of politics and social well-being and what have you? Have those functions be played by institutions that have left behind the core aspect of religion, which is the kind of belief in God. Right, and I remember when I worked at the Department for International Development at their headquarters in London, and DFID was very keen on working with faith communities as it called them, you know, as partners.
Speaker 1:And I remember getting teased by Richard Chartas, who was then the Bishop of London, who's a dear friend, who said to me that the thing about DFID is that you treat faith communities, as you call them, a bit like social service providers who also happen to have some weird metaphysical views on the side. And his point was, like you know, they're not on the side, the weird metaphysical views are the reasons that they're able to do all of the other stuff. That's how they become congregational spaces. That's why they provide tools for managing mental and emotional state and so forth. If religion at its core is either about theology or maybe about direct experience of, call it, the numinous, can you have post-religious institutions that play those roles at the interface of inner and outer without having some account of the numinous? I do not have any answer to that question, but I think it's a big old question I mean, yeah, it really is, and there's, there's people, as you'll know, who've been trying.
Speaker 2:So the sunday assembly can we have like this you know that that's some kind of social functioning can we get the, the ecstatic and the, a sense of the fantastic? Uh, but without the metaphysics or alan de botton's religion for atheists? And and, yeah, what? May I ask what your intuition on that is Like? Do you sense that you might be able to get the fruit without the root, or like it entails those beliefs, or would you like to remain agnostic on that at the moment?
Speaker 1:Well, it's really interesting. I mean, I think that in a way, it probably is the numinous stuff that really draws people into religions in the first place. People want to believe in something bigger than themselves and, you know, more important than their own well-being. And in a way, when you look at the kind of explosion of interest in psychedelics, that's partly because people are having, you know, they're doing ayahuasca retreats or they're doing psilocybin or whatever it might be, and they do feel like they're having some kind of an encounter with the numinous, with a kind of larger consciousness or something like that.
Speaker 1:Now I also have deep misgivings about the explosion of psychedelics because I think there's issues there about safety and quality control. My brother, jules, actually runs a big research project on compiling what is the evidence on how to help people who have difficult experiences with psychedelics, and the numbers are that quite a lot of people have difficult experiences with psychedelics, experiences with psychedelics. So when you look at, you know, some of the kind of boosterism coming from that field. It does worry me a little bit because it's being presented as a sort of panacea with no risks. But there absolutely are risks, but nevertheless, I mean the underlying point is that you know, I think there's clearly appetite out there for kind of altered states of consciousness, for encounter with the numinous or even with the divine, and again this is stuff that historically people would have seen as religion's department. And I guess you know, to some extent there are new forms emerging in spiritual but not religious land that purport to speak to that appetite. But I guess, in the same way that the psychedelic industry, to call it that, often has a problem with quality control. I mean, there's awful stories of kind of abuse from lots of ayahuasca retreat centres in Peru, for example.
Speaker 1:I think spiritual but not religious as a world sort of has a wider problem with quality control than that. I mean, something else that my brother again has written about really interestingly is the phenomenon of so-called conspirituality, of how that spiritual but not religious worldview seems to be quite vulnerable oftentimes to conspiracy theories. And we saw so much of this during COVID with kind of communities of people who sort of felt spiritual but not religious, you know, taking up wholesale kind of anti-vaxxing conspiracy theories or even kind of QAnon type conspiracy theories and so on and so forth. So I think there's a really interesting question there about quality control and you know, when you look at religions, they're by no means infallible on that, but they do have systems like. This is why you have bishops, for example, in churches, so that you have the same supervisory structures that a psychotherapist would have with having regular meetings with their supervisor.
Speaker 1:But yeah, in the end I think that you know there's a question I don't know the answer to there about, I mean, I'm interested because I work on, you know, political issues and polarization and stuff. I'm interested in how you fill that religion shaped hole. But I think that both Richard Charter's provocation to me of can you do that without the kind of numinous stuff and also just the clear appetite that people have for those kind of forms of encounter with the numinous I don't know if you can do it without religion, but then equally, as soon as you do start talking about religion, the appeal of what you're saying will diminish to those people that are kind of still religious and they are dwindling in number. So there's a kind of dilemma there and I don't know what you do about that.
Speaker 2:Gosh, alex, there's so many different threads. I'd love to pull on there, but I'm aware that we are running out of time. I wonder if I could just ask one final question. So, if I come back to your question, how do we fill that religion-shaped hole? Religion shaped hole, I I feel that kind of yearning, metaphysically and otherwise. Um, what do I do with it? What's the larger us kind of offer on that?
Speaker 1:well. I mean, I think there's various um capacities that we can work on and should work on individually, which really matter at this point. I think the ability to steady ourselves is really important in the face of things that we perceive as threatening. That might be through something like meditation or mindfulness, but it doesn't have to be. There's lots of tried and tested techniques, but it turns out, I think, to be increasingly important right now that we are able to manage our sense of threat perception. You remember the great Viktor Frankl? The concentration camp survivor, who became a psychotherapist, observes in his book Man's Search for Meaning that between stimulus and response there's a space, and in that is our power to choose. And if we can cultivate the ability to make conscious choices about how we respond to perceived threats, rather than our amygdala doing it on autopilot, that's important not just for our own ability to cope and be resilient, but also for the resilience of the societies that we're part of.
Speaker 1:I think a second thing is really cultivating our ability to have conversations across difference. This is what we're doing at the moment, for example, in a training program we've developed to help people have climate conversations with people who have different values, different attitudes. This is a habit that we've sort of fallen out of over the last decade or two, partly because, you know, in real life we live in increasingly homogenous little communities where we're more likely than ever before to kind of study with, work with, befriend, even date and marry people with similar backgrounds and outlooks to our own. And of course, then that's all turbocharged by the whole thing of online echo chambers as well. So our ability to have kind of curious conversations with people where we're showing respect, practicing active listening, asking open-ended questions, that stuff is a big big deal. It gives us a sense of connection and it makes our society so much healthier and better able to navigate disagreement.
Speaker 1:And then I think a third thing is the storytelling aspect, about being really intentional and deliberate about the stories that we tell ourselves, about who we are, the stories that we use to make sense of the world, and also the stories that we share with others, like on social media or in conversation. Because something that Mifgat goes on and on about is that stories are self-fulfilling prophecies. They create the reality that we inhabit as much as they describe it. It's something you see with. Like take a run on a bank, right, A story begins to circulate the bank doesn't have enough money to meet everyone's withdrawal requests, and then people start to believe the story and they queue up outside the bank and before you know it, the stories become reality and that dynamic happens in lots of more subtle ways too.
Speaker 1:So I think those are three things that we can all do to help, you know, build up mental capacities that are also relevant in the political realm. But I think that ultimately, the kind of unanswered question there is that you know, a lot of this work is best done in community with others, and that's been at the heart of what religions have historically offered that doing this kind of self-help shouldn't be just an individual thing, that actually doing it in community, in small groups, for example, is much more effective and much more fun and much more connecting and empowering and all the rest of it. So finding ways to create those places to congregate, those networks of belonging, where we feel seen and valued and we feel safe enough to kind of work on ourselves and allow our kind of shortcomings to be seen, that's really important, and the more that we're working to create those spaces in small ways in our lives, the better I think.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Alex. You've given me and I'm sure everybody who's listening to this loads to think on. I really appreciate your input and look forward to seeing how larger us develops.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much, really enjoyed the conversation.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to this episode of the Examined Life. Today, I've been in conversation with Alex Evans, founder of the organisation Larger Us. You can find out more about Alex and his work at largerus. As ever, I'd be delighted to hear your thoughts on this episode and whether you have a perspective to share on the religion-shaped hole. It's something I will personally explore on my next Positively Maladjusted Substack, so please feel free to engage with the question there.
Speaker 2:This has been the eighth episode of the season and it's almost done, but not quite. There are another couple of episodes to follow in the coming weeks, so do please stay tuned. My thanks for this episode go to Alex for his time, to you listeners for engaging, and to people who find value in the project and have shared that with me. I find it immensely encouraging and also, as ever, to Colin, who not only made the music you're listening to, but also I realise I'm still using your microphone, colin, so, thank you, I will get it back to you one day. Thank you, for that's all from me for now. I look forward to hopefully connecting with some of you over the coming weeks and I'll be back with another podcast episode in a few weeks time. You, thank you, thank you.