Episode 2 - Meaning
SUMMARY
The pursuit of happiness is one of the founding American ideals. But the overwhelming evidence from the field of positive psychology points to the conclusion that pursuing happiness for its own sake doesn't actually work. What can work, however, is to cultivate a meaningful life, because in doing so, happiness tends to follow as a by-product. What are the things that humans find meaningful? How do they differ from simple hedonism? And what does this tell us about life?
References
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia - Samuel Johnson
Man’s Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
Roy Baumeister on the Psychology Podcast
Daniel Schmactenberger on the Future Thinkers Podcast
TRAnscriPT
RC: Welcome to Conscious Evolution
An Antidote to Meaninglessness
A podcast by Robert Cobbold
In Samuel Johnson’s one and only novel Rasselas, a young Prince of Abyssinia lives along with the other sons and daughters of royalty in The Happy Valley, awaiting that moment when he should be called to the throne.
The Happy Valley, is described as a kind of paradise on earth.
SAMUEL JOHNSON: Here the sons and daughters of Abyssinia lived only to know the soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose, attended by all that were skilful to delight, and gratified with whatever the senses can enjoy. Their appetites were excited by frequent enumerations of different enjoyments, and revelry and merriment were the business of every hour, from the dawn of morning to the close of the evening.
RC: The delights and distractions of the Happy Valley were so intoxicating that none of the princes or princesses ever thought of leaving, which, of course, was exactly the intention. Of the world outside the happy valley they were told of nothing but misery and suffering, and they considered themselves extremely lucky to have been spared such a fate.
SAMUEL JOHNSON: Thus they rose in the morning and lay down at night, pleased with each other and with themselves, all but Rasselas, who, in the twenty-sixth year of his age, began to withdraw himself from the pastimes and assemblies, and to delight in solitary walks and silent meditation.
RC: Observing this change in his behaviour, the courtiers and servants attempt to inveigle him in revelry and distraction. But Rasselas resists their invitations, and instead goes for long walks by the river, where he observes the fish in the stream, the birds in the trees and the goats browsing among the rocks and he thinks to himself:
SAMUEL JOHNSON: What makes the difference between man and all the rest of the animal creation? Every beast that strays beside me has the same corporal necessities with myself: he is hungry, and crops the grass; he is thirsty, and drinks the stream; his thirst and hunger are appeased; he is satisfied, and sleeps; he rises again, and is hungry; he is again fed, and is at rest. I am hungry and thirsty, like him, but when thirst and hunger cease, I am not at rest. I am, like him, pained with want, but am not, like him, satisfied with fulness. I can discover in me no power of perception which is not glutted with its proper pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted. Man surely has some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification; or he has some desire distinct from sense, which must be satisfied before he can be happy.
RC: To try and discover what this might be, Rasselas leaves the Happy Valley along with his mentor Imlac
SAMUEL JOHNSON: To judge with mine own eyes of the various conditions of men, and then to make deliberately my choice of life.
RC: Rasselas’s choice of life is something of a luxury. As Imlac points out, very few people live by choice. Most people are too busy answering the question, how can I stay alive to have any time to think about the question, how should I live?
But as human history has unfolded, as billions of people have been raised out of poverty, and particularly in the Western world living standards have improved, more and more people have found themselves confronted by Rasselas’s question.
Given a degree of choice in the matter, how should one live in order to be happy?
I think it’s about time we had an answer.
In this podcast we’re going to approach some of the deepest questions that a person can ask themselves, and we’re going to venture answers which are as original as they are surprising.
We’re going to hear from Russian Anarchists and Sufi mystics, towering intellects and maverick scientists, weaving a story that starts with the emergence of life on earth and reaches out far into the future to a hopeful vision of where humanity might go.
But before we take one step further I want to introduce you to one of the most inspirational voices of the 20th century, without whom, no story about how to find happiness in life would be complete:
INTERVIEWER: We’re going to meet Viktor Frankl, the internationally famous psychiatrist, writer and lecturer. He deals with the most common ailment of our time: meaninglessness.
VIKTOR FRANKL: Certainly nobody of us is spared suffering at one time or another, but everybody in the midst of suffering, is given a chance to bear testimony of the human potential at its best. Which is, to turn a personal tragedy into a human triumph.
INTERVIEWER: Dr. Frankl, what is meant by logotherapy?
VIKTOR FRANKL: Therapy means healing. And logos means meaning. Thus logotherapy is really healing through meaning, although this of course is an oversimplification.
RC: Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905. He studied as a neurologist and psychiatrist, and in his student days even had contact with Sigmund Freud. After his graduating he began treating suicidal patients at the psychiatric hospital. His career looked promising.
But all of that came to an end after the Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938. As a Jew, Frankl was barred from treating Aryan patients, and quickly relocated to the last remaining hospital in Vienna in which Jews were allowed to be treated.
Far worse was to come.
Frankl and his newly-wed wife Tilly Grossner were taken to the Jewish Ghetto in Czechoslovakia, and from there to Auchswitz, along with his mother and his brother.
In his extraordinary book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl describes in harrowing detail the tortures and torments of life in a concentration camp, but there was one scene in particular which struck me to the core. He writes:
VIKTOR FRANKL: I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or deliria, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.
RC: Despite the terrible suffering and mindless cruelty which Frankl describes, the most moving parts of his book are not dark and depressing, but poignant tributes to the human spirit.
On his second night in Auschwitz, he writes how he was woken by the sound of music.
VIKTOR FRANKL: I shall never forget how I awoke from the deep sleep of exhaustion on my second night in Auschwitz — roused by music. The senior warden of the hut had some kind of celebration in his room, which was near the entrance of the hut. Tipsy voices bawled some hackneyed tunes. Suddenly there was a silence and into the night a violin sang a desperately sad tango, an unusual tune not spoiled by frequent playing. The violin wept and a part of me wept with it, for on that same day someone had a twenty-fourth birthday. That someone lay in another part of the Auschwitz camp, possibly only a few hundred or thousand yards away, and yet completely out of reach. That someone was my wife.
RC: What Frankl could never have known as he lay awake that night was that he would never see his wife again.
When the war ended and Auschwitz was liberated in 1945, Frankl was the only member of his family who survived.
But despite this terrible loss, despite everything that he’d ben through, Frankl refused to let what had happened to him define the trajectory of his life. The lesson to be learnt from Auschwitz, he said, was not that life was meaningless or full of suffering, nor that humans were inherently evil.
VIKTOR FRANKL: The lesson one could learn in Auschwitz, and in other concentration camps, in the final analysis was: those who were oriented toward a meaning, toward a meaning to be fulfilled by them in the future, were most likely to survive.
RC: In order to put this insight into practice, Frankl returned to work as a psychiatrist after the war, but this time with a different focus. Rather than studying the pathologies of mental health, Frankl believed that if you could orient people toward finding meaning and purpose, you could fortify them with the inner strength needed to overcome the suffering that life inevitably entails. He wrote:
VIKTOR FRANKL: Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
RC: By the time of his death in 1997, Frankl was one of the most well-known psychologists in the world, and his book Man’s Search for Meaning had sold millions of copies.
Fast forward two decades and his message has never been more urgent. In the UK nearly 1 in 4 adults suffer a mental health problem in a given year. In the US, suicide is now the second most common cause of death in men under 40. Here’s author and journalist Emily Esfahani Smith.
EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH: the suicide rate has been rising around the world, and it recently reached a 30-year high in America. Even though life is getting objectively better by nearly every conceivable standard, more people feel hopeless, depressed and alone. There's an emptiness gnawing away at people, and you don't have to be clinically depressed to feel it. Sooner or later, I think we all wonder: Is this all there is? And according to the research, what predicts this despair is not a lack of happiness. It's a lack of something else, a lack of having meaning in life.
RC: Esfahani Smith argues that paradoxically, it is our obsession with pursuing happiness that is leading us to be unhappy. As Viktor Frankl himself wrote: “It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.” And that rather than pursuing happiness, Esfahani Smith argues that we should be trying to pursue meaning. Here’s psychologist Roy Baumeister speaking with Scott Barry Kaufman on The Psychology Podcast.
ROY BAUMEISTER: Conventional wisdom, which is probably right on this, says that living a purely hedonistic life doesn’t satisfy you in the long run. Which is Viktor Frankl’s point that we need something more, we need meaning too. There are also some studies suggesting that you pursue happiness for it’s own sake, and the pursuit of happiness of course one is one of the founding American ideals, pursuing happiness for your own sake doesn’t really work, but if you try to cultivate a meaningful life that can work, and that will make you happy too. So fits what I said. Meaning is more of a prerequisite for happiness. Not so much the other way around.
Being happy and having a meaningful life are not the same thing. But there’s certainly some overlap. You can have a meaningful life without being very happy. But I’m not sure about the reverse, that you can be really happy if you find your life meaningless. That I rather doubt.
RC: We’re going to return back to this idea as we delve more deeply into Baumeister’s research. For now it’s enough to conclude that when we pursue what we find meaningful in life, happiness tends to follow as a by-product. And that’s not the only benefit
EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH: Our culture is obsessed with happiness, but I came to see that seeking meaning is the more fulfilling path. And the studies show that people who have meaning in life, they're more resilient, they do better in school and at work, and they even live longer.
So this all made me wonder: How can we each live more meaningfully?
RC: For thousands of years the answer to Emily’s question was to be found in religion.
But after the historical enlightenment and the age of reason many people began to realise that in their more primitive forms the great mythic religions don’t stand up to rational scrutiny. And in its place we have a science, which for all its explanatory power in telling us how the world works, has almost nothing to say about how we should live in it.
And so today, many people find themselves without a story that can point to their place and purpose in the universe, and yet can withstand the test of rational scrutiny.
If Viktor Frankl was right, then it is this which is the underlying cause of the mental health crisis. The mental health crisis is not just a medical crisis. This is a crisis of meaning.
Of course all of us are different, and so all of us will find meaning and purpose in different things. But what if I told you that there was something which ties all these different purposes together, that explains why they are meaningful, and which could unite all of humanity in a great common enterprise.
Welcome to the Dawn of Conscious Evolution
I’m aware that this is rather a bold claim, - okay, it’s a massive claim. And so if you’re sceptical, you’re absolutely right to be.
But just as the age of religion had their stories about how to find meaning and purpose, I see no reason why the next phase in human history can’t have its own story.
In this way, I invite you think about the current breakdown of meaning and narratives, not as the end of history, but as a necessary transitional phase.
Perhaps we had to eschew all grand narratives in order to rediscover them. Perhaps we had to distance ourselves from the sacred in order to re-imagine it.
Before we can begin, the first thing we need to know is: what are the things that people find meaningful? Then I need to know how are these things different, from short term pleasure or happiness, and why, from an evolutionary point of view, do we experience these positive emotions in the first place?
I interviewed evolutionary psychologist Sarah Hill in order to get a better picture.
SARAH HILL: From an evolutionary perspective we expect that like positive emotions are our brains way of rewarding us for doing things that historically have promoted survival success or reproductive success or you know caring for children other things that get our genes transmitted. And our negative emotions are things you know it's our brain telling us not to do things that generally have harmed our ancestors’ ability to survive and reproduce. And in terms of happiness, just sort of like overall well-being, you know I would sort of conceptualize that as being a sign that you're doing more things to help the likelihood that your genes are going to get into the next generation than harming. Right. And so, feeling good and feeling bad is sort of you know it's just our brains way of telling us whether we're doing the right things or the wrong things. And so, I think about happiness as being a signal that we're doing things to promote survival, promote reproductive success.
RC: Now if you think about it this makes perfect sense. Try this thought experiment. Imagine two cavemen who stumble across a gooseberry bush in the savannah. One of them loves gooseberries, and whenever he eats them his brain gives him a hit of dopamine. The other one doesn’t have this circuitry in his brain, and so he’s relatively indifferent.
So what happens? The first one stuffs his face of course, he eats as many gooseberries as he can and every single time he does so his brain rewards him with a hit of dopamine. And the second, who doesn’t have this brain circuitry, well he has one or two, and he gets bored. So the important question is this: which caveman do you think is most likely to survive? Which caveman is most likely to pass his genes, and to pass on his genes which includes the genes for his brain circuitry, to the next generation? It’s the first one of course.
And so after many generations what we find, is that the entire species has inherited the brain circuitry which rewards us for eating sugar.
One of the first people to put this idea into words was a man named George Romanes. He writes:
“Pleasures and pains must have been evolved as the subjective accompaniment of processes which are respectively beneficial or injurious to the organism, and so evolved the purpose or to the end that the organism should seek the one and shun the other.”
This is evolutionary psychology in a nutshell.
And yet, in our radically altered modern context, where processed sugar is readily available, our love of all things sweet is getting us into trouble.
Here’s Sarah Hill again.
SARAH HILL: I think what's happened is you know our brain, our nervous system has been designed to optimize survival and reproduction in an environment that is very different than the one that we live in currently. And just to give you a really simple example of this, our brain is designed to want to do things that stimulate our opioid receptors, right, like things like dopamine release, like giving hugs to your children and falling in love and having an orgasm and having sex. These are the things that tend to lead to a dopamine release and activate these types of types of receptors in our brain and then we want to go and do those things right? And historically doing things that would stimulate these receptors would lead us to do all sorts of amazing things that would get our genes transmitted from one generation to the next. But now, you know we have things like heroin and we have things like pills that can stimulate these receptors and then we're chasing that instead of actually chasing the things that historically have promoted survival and reproductive success. And we can talk about this on like sort of a smaller scale even with things like playing video games you know feeling rewarding because it feels like we're conquering the world, or eating junk food feels like you know our brain is rewarding us as if we're doing this really positive thing because historically these types of cues, you know would have been rewarding behaviors that would have promoted survival and reproductive success. It's just that our environment's changed in a way where it's no longer a reliable guide.
RC: Right and so as a result of that, and I mean it almost sounds obvious to say so, but if we go around eating chocolate and playing video games and taking heroin, we're not going to be too happy are we?
SARAH HILL: No exactly we're not going to be happy and it’s um, it’s because…. Something being rewarding that used to be a reliable guide to doing the types of things that make our lives feel meaningful. I meant that actually ultimately lead us to feel happy. But it's just no longer the case we can't use that as a reliable guide. And our environment now is set up in such a way that we can do a lot of things that feel really good in the short term but then in the long term they lead us down a dead end.
RC: And yet there are plenty of actions which don’t lead us down a dead end, which continue to give us meaning and purpose, like having children. So, do you think it might be worth making a distinction between things which give us pleasure or make us happy in the short term, and things which give us meaning and purpose in the long term?
SARAH HILL: Alright. Yeah. No I think that that is a useful distinction and to be honest with you I hadn't really ever thought about it too deeply until just right this moment
RC: Did you hear that? She said she’d never really thought about the distinction between short term happiness, and longer term meaning.
It seems that all too frequently, the field of evolutionary psychology, takes pleasure, happiness, meaning and purpose and lumps them all together as “positive emotions”.
But when it comes to explaining the difference between them, explaining why, from an evolutionary point of view, we find certain things meaningful, and why others merely give us short term hits of pleasure, it doesn’t seem to have much to say.
We’ve struck the central enquiry of this podcast.
If short term hits of pleasure can be explained in evolutionary terms as activities which used to improve our fitness, but which no longer do, I want to try and explore all those things which give our lives meaning and purpose, to characterise them as best as I can and to try and discover if they can tell us anything about evolution as a whole.
In other words I’m trying to discover the meaning of life.
Luckily for me I don’t have to start from scratch. There’s a whole field known as positive psychology, which tasks itself with researching questions like meaning and happiness. We’ve already heard from one of them, Roy Baumeister, and here’s another Martin Seligman, considered by many to be the founder of positive psychology. Here he talks about three different strategies for achieving the good life.
MARTIN SELIGMAN: The first path, positive emotion; the second path is eudaimonian flow; and the third path is meaning. This is the most venerable of all the happinesses traditionally, and meaning in this view is very parallel to eudaimonia. It consists of knowing what your highest strengths are and using them to belong to, and in service of something larger than you are.
RC: You heard Seligman mention three different paths. The first he calls positive emotion. This is basically hedonism, seeking pleasure for pleasure’s sake, and as we’ve already heard from Roy Baumeister, this doesn’t actually work and in fact Seligman comes to the same conclusion.
The second path he mentions is eudaimonian flow, and this is just a fancy term for that feeling you get when you’re totally lost and absorbed in doing something that you love. You don’t even sense time passing. We’ll return to that idea later, because as Seligman says, it’s very parallel to the path of meaning.
But it’s that third path which I’m most interested in. Here again, Seligman and Baumesiter are in agreement. His definition of a meaningful life as one which serves something larger than itself, fits closely with that of Roy Baumeister, who in one of the largest studies of its kind found that meaningfulness comes from contributing to other people, whereas happiness comes from what they contribute to you. Happy people tend to be takers, whereas people who find their lives meaningful tend to be givers.
And this runs counter to the conventional wisdom. It is widely assumed that helping other people makes you happy. But what Baumeister discovered is that this effect depends entirely on the overlap between meaning and happiness. That is to say, helping others in and of itself doesn’t make people happy, but it does lead to a more meaningful life, and it this in turn is what tends to predict happiness over the long term.
To tease the two apart, Baumeister uses the example of caring for children or looking after the sick and elderly. In the short term, whilst you’re actually doing these things, you’re not necessarily going to be happy. Looking after the sick and elderly inevitably involves a certain degree of pain and suffering and loss and caring for children, while it can be fun, can also be annoying, stressful, and as any parent will tell you involves setting aside what you’d really like to do. Nonetheless looking after the sick and elderly and having children are so meaningful, that over the long term that sense that you’re leading a meaningful life can itself lead to happiness and contentment.
To quote another of Baumeister’s studies: happiness is about giving the self what it wants while meaning is all about transcending the self.
And this leads us nicely onto our second ingredient for a meaningful life – and that is transcendence.
EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH: Transcendent states are those rare moments when you're lifted above the hustle and bustle of daily life, your sense of self fades away, and you feel connected to a higher reality. For one person I talked to, transcendence came from seeing art. For another person, it was at church. For me, I'm a writer, and it happens through writing. Sometimes I get so in the zone that I lose all sense of time and place. These transcendent experiences can change you. One study had students look up at 200-feet-tall eucalyptus trees for one minute. But afterwards they felt less self-centered, and they even behaved more generously when given the chance to help someone.
RC: Esfahani Smith found that, for those people who have experienced moments of transcendence, and in fact this turns out to be a majority of people, they consider those moments to be amongst the most meaningful of their lives. So there’s something incredibly powerful going on here.
These are heightened states of consciousness, when the illusion that we are a separate I, a separate self, isolated in a bag of skin, falls away, and is instead replaced by the felt reality that there is no line between self and world, between subject and object. And this feeling is so self-evident, so concrete, that it feels as if we have just woken from a dream.
For those people who’ve had such an experience I don’t need to explain it. But for those of you who are a little more sceptical, here’s Daniel Schmactenberger with a more hard-nosed explanation of the scientific fact of the interconnectedness of all living things:
DANIEL SCHMACTENBERGER: What the fuck am I without all the plants that make all the oxygen. I don’t exist, I can’t breathe. My mother wouldn’t have been able to breathe, I wouldn’t have been born, right? Without plants I am not even a concept. So, how am I separate self if I require the plants. But the plants require the pollinators and the micro rise in the soil and on and on. And what would I be without gravity? I’m not fucking anything gravity or without electro magnetism. What would I be without the people that came before me that made the language within which I think all of thoughts, that is actually patterned the way in which I think and feel and structure the world, right?
And I start to say, “Well, shit. I’m actually, I wouldn’t exist without all of it.” So, that South African saying ubuntu, I am because we are is actually profound. Meaning me as a separate self, right? Okay, so take gravity away, take electro magnetism away, take the plants away. I’m floating in the middle of the universe with no, I’m not even floating. There’s nothing holding me together, right? Like, the concept of me as a separate self is nonsense, it’s a misnomer.
RC: Now it’s possible to understand what Daniel is saying a cerebral, factual kind of way, but it’s quite another for that knowledge to become part of who you are. Just as I can know logically that worrying about the future is irrational, it’s quite a different thing to actually stop worrying about the future. It’s one thing to know the truth, and another to live the truth.
And it is this deep, embodied sense of knowing that I really am inseperable from all that exists, and actually living in that way, that is the essence of these moments of transcendence. They are so powerful that even the briefest of glimpses can be enough to change us permanently for the better, to make us feel less afraid and more generous even, as Esfahani Smith points out.
So there’s a kind of positive feedback loop between these heightened states of consciousness, helping others, and meaningfulness as each tends to reinforce the others.
And notice how it’s not necessary to be religious to experience transcendence. It could come from awe at the beauty of nature or getting lost in the creative process, although of course there are spiritual practices which for thousands of years have been used to reliably induce just these kinds of experiences.
EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH: In my book I tell the story of a Buddhist meditator who one day was meditating and felt like his sense of self just dissolved. He described it as the self being a veil that just fell away, and what resulted was this feeling of connection with the world around him and with everyone around him.
RC: Perhaps it’s that heightened feeling of connection and presence which can help explain the third piece of our puzzle of a meaningful life and that is creativity.
For as Steve Jobs once said: creativity is just connecting things.
For Esfahani Smith it’s writing, for others it may be painting, but creativity isn’t just about art, creativity extends into all areas of life.
An entrepreneur hatching a business plan, a carpenter fixing a door or a scientist coming up with a new theory to test; these are all acts of creation. Your choice of clothing can be creative, making a joke can be creative, even daydreaming can be creative.
In the very act of living, laughing and loving, we can be creative just by being fully present and alive in the moment.
This is what Martin Seligman referred to as eudaimonian flow. Here’s what positive psychology professor Scott Barry Kaufman had to say about flow and creativity.
SCOTT BARRY KAUFMAN: This is what people who are creative have been saying for many years is what is guiding their creativity. Pure, focused, internally motivated, not externally motivated, no one’s giving you an explicit task other than, the task may be go do something you love doing, that’s the extent of the task. Self motivation, positive emotion, decrease of anxiety, loss of self-consciousness, and being completely immersed and absorbed and losing track of time. I think that is what is most crucial to creativity and to flourishing and to personal meaning and happiness.
RC: Once again the positive psychology research seems to be pointing to some sort of crossover, between losing your sense of self, doing something that you love, and a meaningful life. In Roy Baumeister’s study he found a high correlation between people who considered themselves to be creative and people who found their lives meaningful.
“If happiness is about getting what you want,” he wrote, “it appears that meaningfulness is about doing things that express yourself.”
And just as we can think about transcendence as moments in which you lose your sense of self, we can think about creativity as those moments in which you are being open to experience or being adaptable.
SCOTT BARRY KAUFMAN: Here’s the thing when I look at the literature of openness to experience, I did see that openness to experience was the one consistently most associated with creativity across every domain: arts and sciences.
They’re very adaptable, so they’re able to mix and match lots of seemingly incompatible traits and behaviours and characteristics that you don’t often tend to see in a single person. Most people are either introverted or extroverted, or tend to be more intuitive or more rational thinkers, or tend to be very good at mindfulness or tend to be the daydreamers. You find that creative people mix and match lots of this stuff, so they know when to be really mindful of their surroundings and really observant, and they also know when to go within and think about they’re own daydreams and think about their own visions of the future, and figure out how to integrate all these different things.
RC: So far the positive psychology researchers seems to be indicating three different kinds of behaviours, three values, three pillars of a meaningful life.
The first is cooperation, serving others, serving something larger than yourself and connecting with other people.
The second is transcendence, heightened states of consciousness when we are lost in awe at the beauty of the world, when we lose our sense of self and we connect with something much deeper, more profound, more real even.
And the third is creativity, when we express that which is unique within ourselves and we bring it out into the world. And this can also be thought of as the ability to be adaptable and open to our experience.
If these are the things that humans find most meaningful, how do they differ, in evolutionary terms from those things which give us short term hits of pleasure, and what can this tell us about evolution writ large?
Next episode we’re going to take a closer look at the evolution of cooperation.
We’re going to hear how cooperation came to be left out of the biology textbooks, leaving us with an impoverished view of evolution as a cruel and heartless process where only the vicious can survive.
Instead we’re going to hear how cooperation has been the major creative force in evolution from the single cell right the way through to human civilisation, and we’re going to be try and discover why, from an evolutionary point of view, cooperation gives our lives meaning and purpose.
Conscious Evolution is a podcast by Robert Cobbold.
Editing was done by Thomas Glasser, and Sound design by Mark Pittam.
Rasselas and Samuel Johnson were played by Max Marcq, and Viktor Frankl was played by actual Holocaust Survivor Werner Reich. You can hear more about his story by looking up his TED talk – how the magic of kindness helped me survive the holocaust.
I’d also like to give a special thank you to evolutionary psychologist Sarah Hill for speaking to me, and to Robbie MacInnes and Ant Adeane for all their expertise in the art of podcasts.
And above all to the Incredible Afro Celt Sound System for letting me use their extraordinary music for the soundtrack. All of the songs you’ll hear in this episode are by Afro Celt Sound System. Check them out on Spotify, and if you’ve never listened to them live, go. It’s spectacular.
To find out more about the philosophy of Conscious Evolution, go to ConsciousEvolution.co.uk