#483 — The Knots We Tie Ourselves Into

0:01Alain de Botton:You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org. There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today.

0:25Sam Harris:I am here with Alain de Botton. Alain, Thanks for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. So I think this conversation probably is, I don't know, two decades coming. I feel like I've known about you for at least 20 years and admired your work from afar. You've done many things. You've written many books and you have the School of Life, which I would love to talk about. But how do you describe your career at this point? What is it that you focus on and how are you showing up mostly now as a thinker?

0:58Alain de Botton:Sure. I mean, I'm broadly interested in the slightly paradoxical and elusive sources of human happiness, unhappiness, sorry, that are not really related to material or political shortfalls or events, but broadly lie in the psychological space. Our amazing human ability to make a hell out of often pretty benign circumstances. I'm fascinated by, as I say, the knots we tie ourselves into. And I write books. I operate on YouTube. As you say, I run this organization called the School of Life in London. We're interested in emotional education. and I'm also a psychotherapist. So I see clients one day a week.

1:44Sam Harris:Nice.

1:44Alain de Botton:And as well as writing books and things.

1:46Sam Harris:And the School of Life has published many books. Are you the author of those books or is it?

1:52Alain de Botton:I am. I and a colleague are the author of all the books. Yes. Wow.

1:56Sam Harris:So you are more prolific than you get credit for then. Because how many books have you written? There are a lot of them.

2:02Alain de Botton:Well, the School of Life has 70 books under its brand and I've written 15 under my name. So it's a little too much. And I leave it to experts to diagnose what the problem might be.

2:13Sam Harris:This is L. Ron Hubbard territory, though happily with much better content. Wow. Okay, well then I'm glad to see you away from your keyboard for at least the hour that we're speaking. Thank you. Well, see, you have focused on these timeless issues of, as you just put it, Our capacity to suffer unnecessarily, it's pretty easy to uncouple that from the historical moment. There are ways in which current technology and changes in culture, I think, are amplifying that capacity and making it more difficult to be happy in some very ordinary ways. Perhaps these changes are making it easier, too. Let's just talk about culture for a moment.

3:01Sam Harris:What most concerns you about the cultural changes that we're seeing happening, more or less accelerating hour by hour around us now?

3:13Alain de Botton:I wonder if I might start in an unusual, slightly unusual and slightly provocative place, which is with religion and with the decline in much of the modern world with what I would be careful to call a religious mindset as opposed to belief. and I think it was still, you know, I still diagnose modern societies as coming out of the very long religious age which preceded it. And, you know, taking my cue from a thinker like Nietzsche who predicted, I think very accurately, that the end of belief would be trouble for human beings. I mean, it's not like there was no trouble before, don't get me wrong, there was a lot of trouble before as well, but that there were particular kinds of trouble that were going to beset non-religious eras, predominantly non-religious eras.

4:03Alain de Botton:And I think it's a good place to look. I mean, let's look at some of the things that religious societies do and secular societies have problems with. One of the things that religious societies do is to socialize in ritual forms, certain kinds of psychological transitions, which secular societies have a lot of trouble orchestrating or putting on the agenda. I mean, our diaries are filled with business meetings and technical priorities. In the more religious eras, days were devoted to ideas, to priorities of the soul, if you like. Now, one can have all kinds of objections to how those priorities were framed, But it's a very interesting way in which in the 19th century, what happens is that private life gets personalized and individualized to an unprecedented degree.

4:55Alain de Botton:And so if you're in love, if you're struck by nature, if you're interested in community, if you're moved by the sight of mountains, etc., you do that on your own. You're not within any kind of structure. And, you know, we've had a hard time cohering people into structures that, you know, guide psychological, I guess one you might call health. Religions talked of the soul. We don't need to use that word soul, but it's a very interesting word.

5:24Sam Harris:Let me just explore that in the current context. I mean, there are religious societies or large communities now that you envy for the degree to which their commitment to their specific doctrines and ideology grants them depth of community and kind of thickness of culture, but they're not atomized in ways that you admire? Yeah.

5:50Alain de Botton:Again, slightly strangely, no. I'm not interested in looking backwards or sideways to religious eras. I'm doing something slightly unusual, which is to say, to really advocate for creativity. Creativity in the areas in which religions used to operate. I'm not interested in reviving religions or fostering new forms of religiosity, but rather in exploring what religions were up to and thinking about what some of the gaps, you might say, are. I mean, many of the museums of Europe, take the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, were explicitly modeled in the late 19th century on churches. There was a very common belief that culture would replace scripture, that in the absence of divine beliefs, what would pick up the slack, what would direct emotion, what would provide points of communion, etc., would be the arts.

6:46Alain de Botton:And that's why, as I say, so many civic cultural buildings look like churches or temples, places of worship, the very direct kind of reference. And so one might say, well, isn't that fair enough. And I draw attention really to the way in which that seems a slightly incomplete project. So I'm speaking to you from London. If you showed up at the Tate Gallery and went to the Rothko room and knelt down in front of a Rothko and burst into tears and were profoundly moved in a way that we're not really used to in the age of museums and according to the codes of how to behave in a museum, you'd be quickly ushered out by the guards.

7:23Alain de Botton:You're supposed to imbibe art in ways that are, you know, one might say chilly, even cold. It's a private experience. It's non-ecstatic. It is not done with others. And there's a sort of limit to what we're allowed to expect from a work of art. It's both meant to be extremely important and nothing to cry about, or indeed dance about. And that strikes me. And I'm intrigued because all societies, I mean, take the ancient Greeks who had some fascinating rituals. So once a year, there was the festival of Dionysus. Dionysus, the god of wine, the god of night, the god of folly. And he's got his ritual moments.

8:03Alain de Botton:And the whole citizenry, especially women, exit the city during the festival of Dionysus, a dance in ecstatic ways to the beating of drums. And of course, our friend Nietzsche here is very interested in this. What's going on here? What are the ancient Greeks knowing? What do they know about us that we seem to have forgotten? And I'm not the first person to point out that there has been a huge increase, at least in recorded incidents, of what we call mental illness, mental unwellness. And one of the ways of thinking about that epidemic of mental unwellness is that the extreme emotions, the untenable emotions that manifest themselves now privately, have been, in different points in history, marshaled around common rituals which one might say handled them pretty cleverly, quite intelligently.

8:58Alain de Botton:For the ancient Greeks, the concept of going a little mad once a year, or perhaps more often, was taken very seriously and was seen as different from actually being mad. Going mad is something that you do because there's divine madness in each of us. Being mad is a more permanent state, often to do with denying the fact that there is divine madness in us. And so, you know, the Greeks rather cleverly had these two characters, Apollo and Dionysus, at the center of their culture. Apollo interested in reason, in calm, in order, balance, symmetry, and Dionysus very interested in other things. Again, I'm less interested in the specifics of these gods.

9:41Alain de Botton:We might find other gods. We might find other festivals. We might look at things differently, but there's a methodology there. There's a way of structuring experience which modern society doesn't have. And I'm very interested in drawing attention to that.

9:55Sam Harris:Well, that's very interesting. I think I want to just explore all of that terrain again a little more systematically, just because I'm interested to discover if there's anything we disagree about. I think you and I have been thought to have disagreed. I think your book, Religion for Atheists, came out. When was that? 2012.

10:17Alain de Botton:About the same time as you were very prominent on what looked like another side.

10:22Sam Harris:I was the four-headed atheist along with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Tennant. And yeah, I think people thought you and I fundamentally disagreed about a few things there. And I'm hearing echoes of that suspicion in what you just said, but I'm not sure I disagree with any of what you said, but I just want to try to figure this out. So I think I can completely sign up to the set of claims that I thought I heard, which is that one, secular culture is uncomfortable with ecstasy, right? We don't have a frame in which to think about it and integrate it and normalize it and even prioritize it.

11:04Sam Harris:And ecstasy might even be the wrong noun. It's more that there's a positive end to the continuum of human well-being that has not been well explored, especially in Western culture and especially of late.

11:18Alain de Botton:And I very much, I very much like your use of the word ecstasy. I think it's, it's bang on. And, and, you know, let's go straight to the nightclub at this point. You know, the word ecstasy has been linked to obviously traditionally a drug that you take at a nightclub. And, you know, even if you think of the nightclub, the nightclub, there are nightclubs all over the world. They don't have very high cultural prestige. They don't have, there's no psychological meaning appended to them. There's no transcendental function. They are in the world of fun, of recreation, which I think is a real pity. And I think one of the things that the modern world does is it misses out on drawing from things like the night club, the themes the previous ages would have mined in them.

12:04Sam Harris:So just to add a few pieces to this puzzle for you to work with. I think what you're arguing for is that secular culture needs a conception of profundity and the sacred that traditionally only religion was able to give us.

12:20Alain de Botton:Totally, totally. That's absolutely right. And even, you know, take the concept of the planetarium. So all around the world, planetariums, you go and look at stars. How do we justify planetariums? It's overwhelmingly to do with scientific explanation rather than or. or AWE. In other words, you know, you go to planetarium and they're very keen to tell you about the precise dimensions of, you know, Kepler 32b and, you know, the rings of Saturn, etc., rather than what I think would be an equally apposite point, which is how small we are in the universe, you know, ego reduction, which has traditionally been one of the functions that religion has taken on very effectively.

13:00Alain de Botton:You know, in Zen Buddhism, there were moon viewing ceremonies on platforms. Poetry was read, rice cakes were eaten, or still are in some parts of Japan at some points. In other words, the moon is being used not as an astronomical phenomenon, but as a sort of psychosocial phenomenon, as a tool of culture. And that's very helpful. So if we look at the nightclub, the planetarium, et cetera, there are lots of things that secular culture has but isn't properly connecting up with some of the themes that religions were pretty good at bringing to the fore.

13:36Sam Harris:Well, now, as you, I'm sure, are aware, there's this resurgent interest in psychedelics, both on the research end and on the so-called recreational end. And granted, there are two very different moods with which one can approach this project. It can be the nightclub mood of just having fun or the more contemplative mood of actually trying to understand something deep and durable and profound about the nature of your mind and your capacity for overcoming the unnecessary suffering of which you referenced at the beginning here.

14:11Alain de Botton:Yes. I mean, I think psychedelics are very interesting. I've explored this theme. I mean, if we look at, you know, you mentioned these two functions. Absolutely. I mean, if you, You know, one of the functions of psychedelics, MDMA, etc., is socially to remind us of what we have in common with other people. You know, when people say, I took this substance and I loved everybody. This is, of course, one of the feats of kind of spiritual development in all religions, that it is through kind of meditative activities and also ecstatic activities that you discover that the barriers between humans are, let's put it gently, exaggerated in normal life.

14:50Alain de Botton:In normal life, we focus on the differences, but how interesting and how nice life would be if we focused on the similarities. And we may need a substance and a setting in which that can more easily be accessible to us. And then, you know, you mentioned self-exploration. Well, exactly. I mean, the Freudians, bless them, and I'm very indebted to the Freudian tradition, they understand that one of the main obstacles to thinking about yourself is fear, that there a resistance based on a fear of all sorts of deeply uncomfortable things about oneself, like, you know, one's sexuality may be more complicated, one may have aggressive urges where one's supposed to be merely, inverted commas, nice, etc.

15:29Alain de Botton:And that a substance like MDMA might lower the defenses, enabling one to achieve insight. And again, you know, what a serious mission for something which for too long languished in the lane called fun.

15:45Sam Harris:Have psychedelics been part of your process? I mean, have you taken the various drugs?

15:52Alain de Botton:I don't know if I'm going to be arrested for saying so. I don't know. But yes, I have taken MDMA and psilocybin in sort of clinical or pseudo-clinical settings. In other words, for these ends of self-exploration more than so-called fun. And they've been tremendously helpful in essentially, you know, my problem with drugs and alcohol was always that these things were not being used seriously. It's not the substance itself that I didn't have any problem with. And again, religions have been wonderful at reminding us. I mean, you know, what is Dionysus responsible? He's responsible for the God of wine.

16:29Alain de Botton:He's a God of wine. And how interesting to put wine right at the center of, you know, ritual and psychological development. And we too often fail to do that.

16:40Sam Harris:Yeah, well, the Greeks, as you know, had the Ellicinian mysteries for a couple of millennia. And, you know, those who partook came away saying that this was the foundational few days of their lives. And to some degree, at least if we don't blow it and recapitulate some of the eras of the 1960s here, what the current moment promises is a more sober, more methodical, more scientifically informed, but yet nonetheless profound kind of reintegration of that kind of ritual, you know, the pharmacological ritual in culture.

17:18Alain de Botton:I mean, you know, I'm thinking about why people are boring. All human beings have very complex lives, but we all know some people who, when you come into their vicinity, you yourself feel that you have an awful lot to say to them and around them. And there's a lot of feeling. And other people, we feel, you know, they are saying, what have you been up to lately? And the mind goes completely blank, largely because I tend to think that this is a function of how much they've explored of themselves. A so-called interesting person is generally somebody who's been very interested in themselves, not in a narrowly egocentric way, but they've opened a lot of doors.

17:52Alain de Botton:And I think one unconsciously senses that when you come into contact with them, and then you have a lot to say, I would immediately put you in that category, Sam, which is why people enjoy talking to you. And I think that one of the things that psychedelics allow people to do is more easily explore bits of their minds, which when they are outside of the substance, continues and gives them a kind of space, which they allow to other people to, you know, explore their own minds. And so one ends up, you know, having a more interesting time and a more, if you use a hackneyed word, compassionate time, where there's a lot more on the table to discuss and to feel.

18:31Sam Harris:Well, let's talk about the attenuation of the ego, because it strikes me that there's a normative, optimal, entirely desirable version of this. And it's one that I've thought a lot about and spoken a lot about. But there's also pathological counterfeits, I would say. And they relate to the discomfort we referenced a moment ago around around ecstasy and secular culture and its political implications. I mean, when you're talking about, you know, the Dionysian attitude and what that looks like at the level of a crowd, I mean, it looks one way in a rave or, you know, other nightclub setting. It looks another way in a political context, you know, that, you know, one could argue that at a large political rally, you know, Nuremberg looking or otherwise, there is a kind of self-overcoming of the individual.