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Welcome to Humanism Now, a podcast about secular ethics, curiosity, and compassion.
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I'm your host, James Hodgson.
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My guest today is Rebecca Goldstein, philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow.
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She's the author of books including The Mind-Body Problem, Incompleteness, Betraying Spinoza, and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.
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In 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, and she's been named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.
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Rebecca will also be the keynote speaker at the World Humanist Congress in Ottawa this August.
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And I'm delighted to welcome her ahead of that conference to discuss her latest book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.
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A book about what it means to matter and why that need shapes so much of our human lives.
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Rebecca Goldstein, welcome to Humanism Now.
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Well, it's a pleasure to be here.
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I ought to just add that book 36 Arguments for the Existence of God had a subtitle, which was a work of fiction.
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Yes, probably best for this audience to clarify that.
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It was really interesting when I was on book tour with that.
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When I went down south in the US, that subtitle was in How It and I would get the true believers, and it led to some very interesting dialogue, actually.
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Yeah, well, I would imagine a book titled That Way Around is more likely to get intrigue than the other way around, perhaps.
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But the latest book is about mattering, and it's a fantastic, brilliant work that I would recommend to all humanists, certainly.
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There's so much in there.
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But I'd be fascinated to know about the genesis of this book.
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How do you even start to approach addressing a concept as broad and as deep as mattering?
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I really had to ease into it because you know my background is in analytic philosophy and particularly philosophy of science, philosophy of math.
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And those who have been trained in analytic philosophy tend to like problems that can be analyzed and very precisely.
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And so, as you say, this is very broad, it's very existential.
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That's just not the way I had been trained or was inclined to go, certainly in my early philosophical career.
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But I do this thing of occasionally writing novels.
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And it's a form I I love.
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I love to read them and I very much enjoy writing them.
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And in my very first novel, which was called The Mind-Body Problem, and that's of course a classic problem in philosophy of mind, now call it the heart problem of consciousness.
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I had this character, and the editor who had acquired it had asked me in our first conversation, I don't understand your main character.
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She's very attractive, she's very sexually desirable.
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That gets a lot of the pluck going.
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She's she's very bright, she's very funny, she's so unhappy.
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She's always teetering on the cusp of despair.
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Why?
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And it's true, I felt that about her.
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Her very the very first line she spoke to me out of the blue was, I'm often asked what it's like to be married to a genius.
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And I knew this was a character, then and I wrote the novel to find out who this was.
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But that was a very discontented voice.
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And I thought about it for weeks on end, and then I decided, oh, she doesn't feel like she matters.
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Yes, she's very attractive.
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Yes, she's very bright.
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And yes, that could be happening in my house at any moment.
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Yes, she is um, you know, funny and all that, but that's not what most matters to her, you know, what most matters to her is something else.
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And so it sort of glommed onto her in her life in the strange way you are when you write a novel.
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You're not quite yourself, you're half this character.
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We sort of collaborated and she came up with this idea of the mattering map, that there are different ways that we try to prove to ourselves that we matter.
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And had she inhabited a location where being very seductive and having any man you want mattered to her, most mattered to her, she'd be content.
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But that's not where she resided.
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And that just seemed interesting to me, but I put it away, published the novel, put it away, got back to my real work, and other academics, other writers started to take up this notion of the mattering map.
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A behavioral economist wrote an essay, an article published in Harvard Business Review, quoting my main character about this matter.
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And some feminists and some cultural critics took this up.
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And then I thought, oh, well, maybe this has broader applications than just explaining this character to me.
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And so I began to think about it very seriously and to have to do lots and lots of interviews with people all over the place.
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Just I didn't think I would write a book about it.
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It seemed too broad, too mushy to tackle.
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And just I saw its implications everywhere, and that made me shy away from it.
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It was during COVID that I thought our society is really coming apart at the seams.
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We are fighting with each other over everything.
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Does this mattering instinct have something to do with this, this great existential need to prove to ourselves that we objectively matter?
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During COVID, you sat down to decide to write it, particularly about how society is coming apart at the scenes.
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That we are just finding more and more ways of getting all worked up and angry and hostile.
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What is going on?
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And I do think that the closeness of death, this uncontrollable at this point virus was sweeping through us.
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We didn't know how to how to fight it, and it made us feel so vulnerable.
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And clinging all the more to whatever we felt convinced us that yes, our lives have mattered.
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This was not for waste.
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This was not for nothing, this life that might be stuffed out at any moment.
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I think it intensifies that.
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Yes.
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And it's it, as you say, it's soft and mushy, so it's the opposite of physical matter.
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We're talking this is the other side of matter.
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Yes.
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That word matter in English is so rich, it's so amazing, that I can sum up what I think our species is.
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We are creatures of matter who long to matter.
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And one of the strongest manifestations of this is people who deny that we are matter.
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Yeah.
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Like, because how could we truly matter if all we are is matter?
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So I mean you can express this in English quite nicely.
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Yes, yeah, yeah.
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It's a nice coincidence that you have the the word has that dual meaning for sure.
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And I think you mentioned early on that it's it is one of the, if not the core differentiators of us with the rest of the animal kingdom, this longing to matter.
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So what do you see are the roots of this need for humans?
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Yes.
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So should I go all the way back to entropy?
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Please start with entropy, because I I that chapter was yeah, was fascinating.
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So so yes, entropy is and I you don't have to believe me about this.
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You can believe people like Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein.
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It is the supreme law of physics.
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It is the law of physics.
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We know that no matter what we go on to discover, we'll never be falsified.
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That is only true of this law.
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And I try to somewhat explain this.
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It so much depends on the just the mathematics of probability, entropy.
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But entropy is, you know, that things go toward chaos, toward disorder.
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If you leave your house for several months, you come back, there's dust all over.
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There is disorder.
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That is the natural tendency of things that go towards this disorder.
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And all the laws of biology really are derivable from this.
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It's resistance to entropy.
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Life demands order.
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And so all biological systems have to take in great amount of energy to resist entropy, and they they create entropy, it's dissipated into the environment.
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So I like to tell my students, life makes a mess, some lives more than others, and we make a great deal of mess, our our species, and some among us make more mess than others.
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Anyway, so this is true of all life.
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The resistance to entropy, which demands for those creatures who have attention, a tremendous amount of attention focused on the self, you know, on one's own well-being and flourishing.
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We are the creatures because of these amazing objects that we carry around in these craniums, this most sophisticated object that has yet been discovered in the universe, this brain, comes with a capacity for self-reflection, that we can step outside of ourselves and regard ourselves with some degree of objectivity and ask, am I truly deserving of all this attention?
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Which I absolutely have to, by the laws of nature, it just comes automatically by default.
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I have to lavish on myself incessant attention.
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Who am I to devote so much of my attention to myself?
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If the measurement of how much one thinks something matters, which I tend to think means deserving of attention, that's the measure of how much I think something matters is how much attention I devote to it.
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It would follow that I think I matter more than anything else in the universe.
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And short of lunacy, none of us think that, right?
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This is that extra self-reflective, justificatory aspect that comes into being a human that supplies us with this existential dimension.
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So this is pretty great that we humans have this.
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We want not only to automatically feel that we are of value, we want somehow to prove it to ourselves.
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And I would go so far as to say, since I don't believe in any kind of transcendent being who gives us value, that we're bringing, just by this question, by being human, by this self-justificatory question, we're bringing values into the universe.
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That's pretty damn good.
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Hooray for us, hooray for the human species.
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They could be very bad values.
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Yes.
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But nevertheless, they're something estimable.
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And we'll come back to that, I think, when we dive into the mattering map for sure.
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Exactly.
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But I really liked this framing in the book of mattering as resistance to entropy and our sort of knowledge of that and our own it becomes from our self-awareness and our our desires.
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But I'm interested, you mentioned COVID earlier, and I think one of the other reasons why we saw this kind of breakdown in society for a lot of people was the realization that no one was in control.
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And I think that's very closely tied again to entropy.
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This was a a natural phenomenon which we tried to, and eventually, of course, we did manage to get a grip on as a society.
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But again, this is why we had a lot of conspiracy theories, you had a lot of anti-science coming out, you had a lot of, and you say there was this tearing apart of society because people wanted to associate blame and they were scared.
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And it really came from that lack of control.
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Do you see a connection between mattering and a the desire for mattering and a desire to have some level of control over our lives?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Yeah.
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Yes, no, absolutely.
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It's very they're very tied up with each other.
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This whole self-reflective step that we can take, it is we have a conception of ourselves.
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We have a conception of ourselves as agents.
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And that is so important for our sense of mattering, that we are the agents of our actions.
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We are yeah, so very, very much tied together.
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And I was pleased to see uh very prominent atheist Spinoza plays quite a large role in the book as well.
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What can Spinoza teach us about mattering?
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Yeah, so two ways, I think.
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So I taught Spinoza for many years.
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It is my favorite thing to he certainly my favorite historical philosopher to teach.
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And it's a voyage with the class to bring them through what seems an impenetrable and totally impersonal work, the ethics, his magnum opus, and to see what happens when they start to make their way into it and how it changes them.
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It's interesting.
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He, of course, wanted to put ethics on a purely secular grounding, and we called his magnum opus the ethics, right?
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And so this was the great work that ceded the Enlightenment.
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And you know, it took 100 years, but he became a major figure during the Enlightenment.
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So but the grounding of ethics on something objective, not on different people's views about what this supernatural deity wants from us.
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But he also, in the course of trying to derive his ethics, and it is, of course, ambitiously claims to be a deductive work, to start with certain premises and then to deduce a la Euclid theorems ending with ethics.
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So a very strong claim that you can deduce aught from is.
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But he introduces this concept of conitas, which is this striving to persist in a thing's own being and to flourish, a striving to persist and to thrive.
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To survive and to thrive, to actually.
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And it's almost as if he implicitly knew that there was a force, which we now know how to name, entropy, against which we must constantly be striving, and that requires so much attention and energy.
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And so that was very, very important to me, and it plays a very important role in his derivation, this conitas, that there's a striving, and that's what the emotions are all about.
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Trying to assess how well this striving is going in our lives.
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When I hate something, it's because it's militating against my survival and flourishing.
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When I love something, it's it's it's encouraging my stuff.
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This conitas is very important.
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So that was interesting to me.
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He almost had the concept.
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Lurking behind this is something against which we must struggle.
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And we now know how to name that entropy.
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So there's that, and there's also that his great conviction that we can find a way of grounding ethics that we can all agree on because it's going to be something objective, something in the universe, not some something that we speculate about.
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And yeah, so those were, I think, the the two ways that, and I don't know if I hadn't spent all those years, you know, in the Spinoza mindset, whether I would have come to think see entropy in exactly this light.
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Oh, this is the thing lurking in the background.
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This explains so much about us.
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Yeah, and that focus on striving is so interesting, again, from a humanist point of view, because the Amsterdam Declaration, which again, you know, written in Spinoza's home country, where humanism is defined as as best it can be, continually returns to this point of striving, is that humans strive humanists strive to be rational.
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We strive to find meaning.
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And I think it's such an important word, and but I think the way you've laid it out there really explains why it's such a humanist ethic to strive, and as you say, striving against entropy, but also not claim that to ever have got there, but for it to to be a constant struggle against the natural forces.
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Yeah.
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But and so we have to do this, and it's really can be derived, you know, we're biological creatures, and biology is really living creatures' answer to entropy.
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Of course, we're gonna lose the struggle.
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All things will.
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The universe itself will lose, right?
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The universe itself will end in a state of maximum entropy.
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But meanwhile, we struggle, and sometimes the struggle is good and sometimes it's not so good.
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Aaron Ross Powell And on the universe, I was also intrigued to hear a physicist, I believe, or certainly a a scientist in Boltzmann being again quite a big part of the story.
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So um, yeah, could you explain how Boltzmann has contributed to the our concept of mattering?
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Well, I mean, Boltzmidge is a tragic thing.
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I love tragic figures.
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That's a novel, probably.
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But people who it Spinoza is one and Boltzmann is another, who presented their ideas too soon.
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It took their peers, the rest of humanity, a long time to catch up.
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Um Spinoza, yeah, took a really long time to catch up.
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I think we're still trying to catch up with Spinoza, and we humanists are we are the descendants of Spinoza.
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Baltzman.
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Baltzman explained entropy.
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He really explained what is going on here.
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Why is there this tendency toward chaos to unraveling, towards destruction?
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And how can evolution, which is um we evolved in greater and greater complexity, how can this be explained in the face of entropy?
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What is entropy all about?
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And there's this great, I don't know how how deeply you want me to quantify, but there's a great entropy means that processes are irreversible, right?
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So that if I crack an egg and scramble it up and make an omelet, if I were to film that and run it backwards, that would be ridiculous, right?
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Everybody would know this is but run backwards.
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This can only go in one direction.
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And beating up an egg is creating more entropy of the egg.
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It's less order.
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But on the microscopic level, if you just look at the molecules moving around, it's reversible.
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It's completely reversible.
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If you film it and you run it backwards, nobody could detect that it was run backwards.
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But the macroscopic is just composed of the microscopic.
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So how can irreversibility have come out of reversibility of the microscopic laws that are completely reversible?
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And he answered that.
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But it wasn't understood in his time.
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And he So here's another way, he felt like he didn't matter.
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He didn't get, you know, he knew he had solved a really important problem, but he felt like he didn't matter, that nobody would ever accept it, that he was not going to contribute to scientific knowledge, and that to his that his life had been a waste.
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And he ended up committing suicide.
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It there were two ways in which the Boltzmann story.
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He's really a very, I love Boltzmann very much.
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He's a very poignant figure, and he did this magnificent work, and he had told us that this is what he wanted to do.
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Some people feel like they matter because they have power and they have money, and that all he wanted was to contribute to the growth of scientific knowledge, and nobody recognized that he had.
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And yeah, it's not that he wanted status, he wanted to be a contributor.
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But to be a contributor, others must recognize your contribution.
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So it wasn't like the status, it wasn't the fame, it wasn't all that.
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It was to be a contributor.
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And that sets us up nicely, as you say, because it really is as much about where the individual is looking for mattering as to how their life actually unfolds.
00:23:09.240 --> 00:23:20.200
And it for Boltzmann, he was just wasn't getting that recognition, that affiliation, the accreditation that he probably knew his work deserved, and the satisfaction of the work alone wasn't sufficient for him.
00:23:20.200 --> 00:23:24.440
And so I think that sets up nicely to introduce the mattering map.
00:23:24.440 --> 00:23:31.400
So could you talk us through the different ways in which humans find and rate mattering?
00:23:31.880 --> 00:23:32.200
Yeah.
00:23:32.200 --> 00:23:38.360
So, you know, as I say, the germ of this went back to this fictional creature and uh character.
00:23:38.360 --> 00:23:48.759
And I was, you know, impressed by the fact that different people, that we all share this need to somehow prove to ourselves, right?
00:23:48.759 --> 00:24:02.039
It's really about ourselves, to be able to live in an easy relationship with ourselves, that we have to somehow be able to justify ourselves that we're living a meaningful life.
00:24:02.039 --> 00:24:09.559
And I think this is true even of the people who are living the most preposterously preposterous lives or evil lives.
00:24:09.559 --> 00:24:11.640
That yes, they too share this.
00:24:11.640 --> 00:24:13.720
To be human is to have this aspect.
00:24:13.720 --> 00:24:15.720
But we do it in such very different ways.
00:24:15.720 --> 00:24:18.120
And so, you know, I was just observing it.
00:24:18.120 --> 00:24:20.279
It's very, very interesting to me.
00:24:20.279 --> 00:24:28.680
Example, I was once sitting in a hotel lobby in Manhattan waiting for a friend who is habitually late.
00:24:28.680 --> 00:24:35.000
And a guy comes up to me this many years ago, comes up to me, he's pestering me, blah, blah, blah.
00:24:35.000 --> 00:24:36.279
This, all this stuff.
00:24:36.279 --> 00:24:37.640
You know, he's trying to pick me up.
00:24:37.640 --> 00:24:42.360
And so I started to talk to him about his life.
00:24:42.360 --> 00:24:45.240
What gives him the impetus to go on?
00:24:45.240 --> 00:24:46.920
What does he think his life is all about?
00:24:46.920 --> 00:24:52.920
It turned out he was, and it was the first time I had heard the this phrase, he was a pickup artist.
00:24:52.920 --> 00:24:54.519
This was what his life was about.
00:24:54.519 --> 00:24:55.640
He picked up women.
00:24:55.640 --> 00:24:58.120
He had his stats, he had his heroes.
00:24:58.120 --> 00:25:01.080
There were books on this, how to do it effectively.
00:25:01.080 --> 00:25:04.039
So this was where he was on the mattering map.
00:25:04.039 --> 00:25:06.360
This was what I called, you know, this was his mattering project.
00:25:06.360 --> 00:25:07.480
It was fascinating to me.
00:25:07.480 --> 00:25:09.559
So I just I talked to people about this.
00:25:09.559 --> 00:25:11.320
It's really interesting.
00:25:11.320 --> 00:25:17.480
And then I started to think during COVID when uh I was thinking, are there patterns here?
00:25:17.480 --> 00:25:26.360
So here's this pickup artist, here's Boltzmann, here's Spinoza, here's me, here's my my friends, novelists, thinkers, all sorts of people.
00:25:26.360 --> 00:25:31.880
The grandma who devotes herself to her children, bringing up her children, so whatever.
00:25:31.880 --> 00:25:33.240
Yeah, there are patterns.
00:25:33.240 --> 00:25:45.480
And I just, you know, I think this is again, it's an empirical hypothesis based on my over 40 years of talking to people about this, it's open to falsification.
00:25:45.480 --> 00:25:47.640
But so far, people have thrown things at me.
00:25:47.640 --> 00:25:49.799
I don't think I have found it falsified yet.
00:25:49.799 --> 00:25:53.720
So there are these four general strategies, I think.
00:25:53.720 --> 00:26:00.519
And I call them the transcenders, the heroic strivers, the socializers, and the competitors.
00:26:00.519 --> 00:26:22.360
And what I have found that when I bring up this mattering thing, whether I'm in a faculty meeting, you know, at Harvard, which has happened, or I'm talking to somebody who's trying to pick me up, how a person understands these questions tell me a lot about whether they're a transcender, a heroic striver, a competitor, or a socializer.
00:26:22.360 --> 00:26:56.200
I'll start with the transcenders, because I think for most of most of our history, at least since the axial age, when we had the leisure to think about this kind, these sort of questions, what is, you know, that life was stable enough that we could think about what are we living for, which happened beginning about 800 BCE to about 200 BCE, when all of the religious frameworks and Western philosophy were generated, that from ever since that most people have been transcenders.
00:26:56.200 --> 00:27:16.279
And that is what we humanists do not believe in, that there is some transcendent being, something metaphysical outside of space, time, and the laws of nature that created those laws of nature, created everything, created the physical order without and the moral order within.
00:27:16.279 --> 00:27:24.120
And that and created us purposefully and intentionally, and we have a role to play or we wouldn't be here.
00:27:24.120 --> 00:27:26.279
And that's what our lives are about.
00:27:26.279 --> 00:27:28.360
And those are transcenders.
00:27:28.360 --> 00:27:38.039
And I must say that the transcenders with whom I've spoken, and I know what it feels like to be a transcender because I was born into a very religious household, Orthodox Jewish.
00:27:38.039 --> 00:27:47.400
And so for the first 13 years of my life, this is the way I thought about my life, that transcenders have a very robust sense of mattering, right?
00:27:47.400 --> 00:27:55.880
You know, they matter to that whose mattering can't be doubted if it were to exist, that which created everything from nothing.
00:27:55.880 --> 00:28:03.000
So, short of lunacy, there is no greater sense of mattering than to be a transcender.
00:28:03.000 --> 00:28:06.120
And it's not surprising that so many people are.
00:28:06.120 --> 00:28:12.440
And transcenders with whom I have had long discussions, they said to me, I just don't understand what gets you out of bed in the morning.
00:28:12.440 --> 00:28:15.480
How can how can you feel like your life has any meaning?
00:28:15.480 --> 00:28:16.600
So that's interesting.
00:28:16.600 --> 00:28:18.840
And that's really interesting to me, right?
00:28:18.840 --> 00:28:23.000
It shows what we're not up against, but it explains.
00:28:23.000 --> 00:28:31.880
It explains some very deep difference between us non-believers and believers, and why it's yes, so emotionally fraught.
00:28:32.360 --> 00:28:34.440
And why often we talk past each other as well.
00:28:34.440 --> 00:28:39.400
When you see a lot of these debates, there really is a disconnect, I think.
00:28:39.400 --> 00:28:47.559
And that's been put down to lots of things, but I think the mattering, viewing it through the let the lens of the uh what oh how people matter.
00:28:47.559 --> 00:28:49.480
Sorry, I think it paused there.
00:28:49.480 --> 00:28:50.279
Are you okay?
00:28:50.279 --> 00:28:51.320
Can you hear me?
00:28:51.320 --> 00:28:51.960
Okay.
00:28:51.960 --> 00:28:53.799
Yeah, sorry, just pause for a second there.
00:28:53.799 --> 00:28:54.519
Beg pardon.
00:28:54.519 --> 00:29:10.360
Yeah, so yeah, when you watch debates on this, it it really is people talking past each other and it and viewing it through this sense of what matters or what where they think that sense of mattering comes from, you suddenly realize why there is this disconnect between, as you say, transcenders.
00:29:11.240 --> 00:29:16.519
And I think it could make us so much more effective if we understood this.
00:29:16.519 --> 00:29:18.600
This was also a great motivation.
00:29:18.600 --> 00:29:25.400
It's don't come at people with you these abstract arguments and that it's make them feel stupid that we're so much.
00:29:25.400 --> 00:29:30.680
But that nothing will get the defenses up more than that.
00:29:30.680 --> 00:29:36.759
But come to them if our come to all of us, our shared humanity.
00:29:36.759 --> 00:29:43.160
That this longing that we all have to prove to ourselves is shared.
00:29:43.160 --> 00:29:52.759
And and yes, so that was to me so important because I've been in debates, I've been, we knock against each other, it's horrible.
00:29:53.240 --> 00:29:57.559
Is it a s purely a sense of service or is there more to it?
00:29:57.559 --> 00:30:00.680
Like service to the greater good, greater power?
00:30:05.000 --> 00:30:12.519
I couldn't possibly be here unless I have a role to play in the narrative of eternity, right?
00:30:12.519 --> 00:30:14.440
And that's crazy from my point.
00:30:14.440 --> 00:30:17.080
That's but what a sense of mattering.
00:30:17.080 --> 00:30:27.559
And so it's no wonder that you know, that transgenders will say to me, I just I just don't understand how you pursue your life.
00:30:27.559 --> 00:30:30.519
What gives you what keeps you going?
00:30:30.519 --> 00:30:35.720
And I think it's just really important to to get in touch with that.
00:30:35.720 --> 00:30:41.799
I I'm happy that I was born into the family that I was born into, because I really know what that feels like.
00:30:41.799 --> 00:30:46.120
And I know what it felt like when I decided I could no longer believe in this.
00:30:46.120 --> 00:30:49.720
But it was like, okay, so what do I do with my life now?
00:30:50.120 --> 00:30:57.240
If you don't mind me asking then, looking back, do you think there was an immediate replacement sense of mattering that you could step into?
00:30:57.240 --> 00:31:10.360
Or was that then a sense of searching for where, but even though you probably you you hadn't come up with the theory yet, but do you think you did go through a process, the go through the process of thinking, okay, where am I finding meaning and mattering in life?
00:31:12.200 --> 00:31:15.320
Yeah, no, I think I didn't have the language, of course.
00:31:15.320 --> 00:31:18.440
I was 13 or 12, something like that.
00:31:18.440 --> 00:31:20.600
I didn't have the language for it.
00:31:20.600 --> 00:31:29.960
But but yeah, there was a sense that the universe was less than I thought it was, and that I was less therefore also than I thought I was.
00:31:29.960 --> 00:31:35.799
But the universe seemed drained for me for quite some time.
00:31:35.799 --> 00:31:41.000
I felt like it was less than I had thought, and less beautiful even.
00:31:41.000 --> 00:31:43.240
I came to think entirely differently.
00:31:43.240 --> 00:31:48.840
It's all the more beautiful because it is explained by the laws of nature.
00:31:48.840 --> 00:31:50.840
How beautiful is that.
00:31:50.840 --> 00:31:51.960
That that is.
00:31:51.960 --> 00:32:02.759
But but yeah, there was that almost almost depression, almost, I don't know, or hopelessness or something.
00:32:03.240 --> 00:32:06.279
Are they not are they non non-religious transcendent mattress?
00:32:07.160 --> 00:32:09.160
Spiritual, but not religious, right.
00:32:09.160 --> 00:32:11.320
That there's actually an acronym for it now.
00:32:11.320 --> 00:32:15.559
But that the the mannering is out there in the universe.
00:32:15.559 --> 00:32:18.600
It's some kind of metaphysics.
00:32:18.600 --> 00:32:33.000
And so I'm careful to distinguish it from yes, we can experience this sense of transcendence, a starring height, or art can do it, this sense of being in touch with something greater than one selves.
00:32:33.000 --> 00:32:40.440
But for transcenders, because I'm very interested in how people go about just justifying their own life, their sense of meaning.
00:32:40.440 --> 00:32:48.200
The transcenders I reserve for those who have some sort of metaphysical transempirical belief.
00:32:48.200 --> 00:32:49.880
It's ontological.
00:32:49.880 --> 00:32:58.440
Mattering is ontological, it's out there, it's not just the psychological experience of feeling in touch with something greater.
00:32:58.440 --> 00:33:09.080
I get that when I read a beautiful mathematical proof or something that's like, oh, transcendence, utter beauty, or Boltzmann's explanation of entropy.
00:33:09.080 --> 00:33:16.920
There's, I feel like transcendence, but not in that ontological metaphysical sense, which we humanists are.
00:33:16.920 --> 00:33:18.360
We reject that.
00:33:18.360 --> 00:33:20.840
So we humanists are not transcenters.
00:33:21.400 --> 00:33:27.960
So with the other the the other three broad categories of tra of matter matterers, would we call them?
00:33:28.360 --> 00:33:30.440
Well, matterers are humans, really.
00:33:30.440 --> 00:33:37.320
Socializers are most people understand mattering is mattering to others.
00:33:37.320 --> 00:33:46.360
When I ask that question, they will often by default supply that that prepositional phrase to others.
00:33:46.360 --> 00:33:48.920
And it is we are social creatures.
00:33:48.920 --> 00:33:53.160
We are gregarious creatures, evolved from gregarious creatures.
00:33:53.160 --> 00:33:58.840
And yeah, we need to have people in our lives to whom we matter, whether we deserve it or not.
00:33:58.840 --> 00:34:00.519
That's what my family is.
00:34:00.519 --> 00:34:01.799
That's what my friends are.
00:34:01.799 --> 00:34:03.400
They're not j judging me.
00:34:03.400 --> 00:34:05.000
Will they pay attention to me?
00:34:05.000 --> 00:34:06.519
Do I deserve it?
00:34:06.519 --> 00:34:07.960
They will give me attention.
00:34:07.960 --> 00:34:12.440
They are my intimates, they are in my life, colleagues sometimes, this sort of thing.
00:34:12.440 --> 00:34:24.360
But and so in that sense, we're all socializers, but just by by being gregarious creatures and helpless graves, we suffer a very long period of helplessness.
00:34:24.360 --> 00:34:29.080
A giraffe is born, it's immediately struggling to stand up.
00:34:29.080 --> 00:34:32.680
It's we take six months to figure out how to roll over.
00:34:32.680 --> 00:34:36.920
So we are very, we're what's called altrucial.
00:34:36.920 --> 00:34:42.599
It's a long period of dependency on others.
00:34:42.599 --> 00:34:45.400
And that's also due to our great big brains.
00:34:45.400 --> 00:35:07.960
Um if it's hard enough to get these brains out of the birth canal, they so they come out very early, with only a third of them, their normal capacity formed, and it takes until the upper 20s or the lower 20s for the last bit, the adult bit, to finally come at taking responsibility for one's own actions.
00:35:07.960 --> 00:35:19.159
But I reserve the term socializers for those who go about this existential dimension that we have by their relationships with others.
00:35:19.159 --> 00:35:25.559
So to have this relationship with yourself, you need a certain these certain relationships with others.
00:35:25.559 --> 00:35:27.639
The two things are collapsed.
00:35:27.639 --> 00:35:31.159
And there are two, there are so many distinct distinctions.
00:35:31.159 --> 00:35:39.559
It can be relationships with the people who are already in your life, but it could be with total strangers.
00:35:39.559 --> 00:35:47.480
And I've spoken to a lot of people, especially millennials, who really see what mattering is as being famous.
00:35:47.480 --> 00:35:51.480
They want to be paid attention to by a bunch of strangers.
00:35:51.480 --> 00:35:53.639
That's what it is to be a celebrity.
00:35:53.639 --> 00:35:59.400
And that is what they feel will answer this existential need.
00:35:59.400 --> 00:36:06.039
If a lot of strangers are paying attention to them, then clearly they deserve their own attention.
00:36:06.039 --> 00:36:17.159
This also comes in many different shapes and flavors that that socializers maybe we could just pause there on that as well, just to draw that out.
00:36:17.240 --> 00:36:20.440
Because I I wanted to come to this later, but I think it's perfect time to raise it.
00:36:20.440 --> 00:36:26.599
And you mentioned earlier, obviously, about we we started talking about the period during COVID when everybody became kind of hyper online.
00:36:26.599 --> 00:36:30.200
Social media was around before, but it seems like it's taken off in a long way.
00:36:30.200 --> 00:36:39.880
And as you say, a lot of now mattering is attached to, as you say, these parasocial relationships and the numbers and quantities rather than the quality of relationships.
00:36:39.880 --> 00:36:47.079
But I feel like a lot of that is now geared, particularly to news media, but also social media, is telling people they don't matter.
00:36:47.079 --> 00:36:52.200
If you are not one of these, if you are not in the top 1%, then you don't matter.
00:36:52.200 --> 00:36:56.280
Do you feel like is that a new development or through social media?
00:36:56.760 --> 00:36:58.679
It certainly has exacerbated it, right?
00:36:58.679 --> 00:37:01.960
It has something to do with capitalism.
00:37:01.960 --> 00:37:17.480
But that there is a a mattering scheme of that there are some people who matter more than others, the the very wealthy, the very powerful, the very famous, often wrapped up into one and the same people.
00:37:17.480 --> 00:37:19.159
Elon Musk or something.
00:37:19.159 --> 00:37:25.240
And so this is and this we all, no matter who we are, we belong to matter.
00:37:25.240 --> 00:37:37.720
And for this to be out there, that mannering belongs to the very few, and that most of us can't can't even we can't get there.
00:37:37.720 --> 00:37:39.240
We we're not going to be very rich.
00:37:39.240 --> 00:37:49.800
We're not going to be we c maybe famous by for a few minutes on Twitter or something like that, but it's it causes tremendous dissatisfaction and dissatisfaction.
00:37:49.800 --> 00:37:59.159
Delilo had this beautiful line, the novelist DeLillo done Delilo in one of his books, that longing on a large scale is what makes history.
00:37:59.159 --> 00:38:03.079
And I think this is especially true for the longing to matter.
00:38:03.079 --> 00:38:05.240
Longing to matter on a large scale.
00:38:05.240 --> 00:38:14.840
When you have people longing to matter and they can't possibly they can't possibly matter given what's put out there, it makes history.
00:38:14.840 --> 00:38:17.800
I think it's made history very much in the United States.
00:38:17.800 --> 00:38:19.960
It's ripe for demagogues.
00:38:19.960 --> 00:38:23.000
Yeah, I am yours, I am your vengeance.
00:38:23.000 --> 00:38:27.559
For people who have been made to feel that they can't even aspire to matter.
00:38:27.559 --> 00:38:29.720
But also explains a lot about cults.
00:38:29.720 --> 00:38:37.639
And they cults can be religious, they can be political, they can be a terrible combination of both political and religious.
00:38:37.639 --> 00:38:41.480
I the the cult leader matters more than everybody else.
00:38:41.480 --> 00:38:45.000
And to the sense that you're his follower, you matter.
00:38:45.000 --> 00:38:46.920
There's two trickle-down mattering.
00:38:46.920 --> 00:38:51.079
So it can explain so much about what goes wrong when our society.
00:38:51.079 --> 00:38:51.880
Yeah.
00:38:51.880 --> 00:38:55.400
So yeah, totally 100% agree with you.
00:38:56.360 --> 00:39:03.000
You've been very generous with us with your time, but I'd love to get the quick explanation of the final two mattering categories.
00:39:04.519 --> 00:39:05.000
Yeah.
00:39:05.000 --> 00:39:06.519
Heroic strivers.
00:39:06.519 --> 00:39:09.400
It was not mattering to God, it's not mattering to other people.
00:39:09.400 --> 00:39:28.920
Certain standards of excellence, Boltzmann was a great example, a standard of excellence that you want to maybe not satisfy, but to approach, to asymptotically get closer and closer to could be these standards may be intellectual, they may be artistic, they may be athletic, they may be moral.
00:39:28.920 --> 00:39:35.159
Some of the people that I that I profile are atheists who are in some, they're secular sites.
00:39:35.159 --> 00:39:40.280
They try to do is they strive to be better and better moral people.
00:39:40.280 --> 00:39:44.360
But the the this is what it is to be a heroic striver.
00:39:44.360 --> 00:39:56.440
It doesn't have to be, you don't have to break records or a it has to be a striving for you, perfecting yourself because you have something that you think matters, knowledge, beauty, prog justice.
00:39:56.440 --> 00:40:04.760
And that's and you are trying to fulfill this in order to be able to live in an easy relationship with yourself.
00:40:04.760 --> 00:40:08.119
And that's briefly what I mean by a heroic striver.
00:40:08.119 --> 00:40:11.720
And competitors are those who understand mannering.
00:40:11.720 --> 00:40:12.599
It's really interesting.
00:40:12.599 --> 00:40:20.519
They are the people who think that mannering is zero sum.
00:40:20.519 --> 00:40:24.760
To the extent that some matter, they matter less.
00:40:24.760 --> 00:40:26.200
They must matter more.
00:40:26.200 --> 00:40:26.840
They understand.
00:40:26.840 --> 00:40:33.480
They were the people who always became a little uncomfortable when I broached the subject because they hear it as mattering more than.
00:40:33.480 --> 00:40:42.360
And yeah, uh once again, we have certain political leaders who are clear competitors, right?
00:40:42.360 --> 00:40:45.639
They must matter more than in everything.
00:40:45.639 --> 00:40:50.840
One of them can't even accept that he ever lost an election because then he'd be a loser.
00:40:50.840 --> 00:40:52.519
Somebody would matter more than him.
00:40:52.519 --> 00:40:56.679
So it's like it's so out there with certain people.
00:40:56.679 --> 00:41:03.880
One very brief story, even competitors who can be a pain to work with, but they can make great contributions.
00:41:03.880 --> 00:41:05.400
And there is this guy I know.
00:41:05.400 --> 00:41:12.760
I had he's an acquaintance, he's a scientist, he's a very he stood, he's a very good scientist, he won a Nobel Prize.
00:41:12.760 --> 00:41:23.720
Another friend of who who knows him better than I said to me, I'll call him X, X was happy for all of 15 years in his 15 minutes in his whole life.
00:41:23.720 --> 00:41:25.559
There were 15 minutes when he was happy.
00:41:25.559 --> 00:41:26.280
When?
00:41:26.280 --> 00:41:30.360
When he got that call from Stockholm, why was it only 15 minutes?
00:41:30.360 --> 00:41:33.559
Because then he realized other people had also gotten the Nobel Prize.
00:41:33.559 --> 00:41:40.679
So he still had to Yes, it's an exaggeration, but it really captures what a competitor is.
00:41:40.679 --> 00:41:41.960
It's hard to be a competitor.
00:41:42.440 --> 00:41:46.840
And how much of this do you feel, because it seems to be slightly that there's obviously different motivations behind them.
00:41:46.840 --> 00:41:53.880
How much do you think where we fall on the mattering map is in our nature and innate versus nurture?
00:41:53.880 --> 00:42:00.039
Because for competitors, that sounds like a deep probably linked to the dark triad personality trait.
00:42:00.039 --> 00:42:05.320
But for the others, perhaps I wonder if it's more to do with our surroundings and the people that we respect growing up?
00:42:08.039 --> 00:42:16.760
Yeah, but I think also with our our talents, our passions, our temperament, I'm the only one.
00:42:16.920 --> 00:42:17.880
It's been very good.
00:42:18.840 --> 00:42:22.679
Um I love it.
00:42:22.679 --> 00:42:25.559
Yeah, I'm the only one in my family who's not a transcender.
00:42:25.559 --> 00:42:27.880
I was brought up to be a transcender.
00:42:27.880 --> 00:42:34.920
All the people I most loved as I was growing up, and I revered my father, were transcenders.
00:42:34.920 --> 00:42:36.599
And I why I couldn't.
00:42:36.599 --> 00:42:38.679
I couldn't continue to believe in that.
00:42:38.679 --> 00:42:41.159
It's like a mind I was born with with whatever.
00:42:41.159 --> 00:42:44.760
So it's tricky, but it's real, it's so individual.
00:42:44.760 --> 00:42:46.840
It is how we go about this.
00:42:46.840 --> 00:42:49.480
And of course we can change it in the course of our lives.
00:42:49.480 --> 00:42:54.280
It's a hard thing to change, it's an extremely hard thing to change, but sometimes it's not working for us.
00:42:54.280 --> 00:42:57.559
We do not it's not contributing to our flourishing.
00:42:57.559 --> 00:43:12.760
And sometimes it's we realize it's not contributing to the flourishing of others that might matter to us, one hopes it would, or that we that we could be of more value to the world if we changed our location on the mattering map.
00:43:12.760 --> 00:43:14.280
So it's hard to be, you know.
00:43:14.280 --> 00:43:19.400
The friend of mine said he was going to get me a bunch of t-shirts to give out that says it's hard to be human.
00:43:19.400 --> 00:43:23.800
And I think that is also something for us humanists to really bear in mind.
00:43:23.800 --> 00:43:24.920
It's hard.
00:43:24.920 --> 00:43:25.480
Yeah.
00:43:26.200 --> 00:43:35.480
And with that, do you what do you think is the relationship between mattering and happiness or fulfillment in life?
00:43:36.440 --> 00:43:37.720
Yeah, and happiness.
00:43:37.720 --> 00:43:53.400
Yeah, I I prefer the sort of uh notion of eudaimonia from the ancient Greeks, this this notion of flourishing, of well, that I think it's very tied with our dealing with our mattering instinct in a good way, at least for us.
00:43:53.400 --> 00:44:05.800
And and and that could, depending on how you go about it, require a great deal of frustration, of disappointment, of a sense of failure.
00:44:05.800 --> 00:44:13.480
Heroic strivers, right, can often go through tremendous sense of disappointment, of frustration.
00:44:13.480 --> 00:44:25.880
Parents of young children, for example, their episodic happiness, that feeling of that buoyant feeling when the endorphins are flowing, it that might really go down.
00:44:25.880 --> 00:44:35.320
But when you ask them, would you trade your life for a life without children, the oh the majority, even though their happiness has gone down, will say no.
00:44:35.320 --> 00:44:37.800
There are studies that show this to be true.
00:44:37.800 --> 00:44:47.320
So that that's because they feel that what they're doing matters, that this the raising these children to be flourishing individuals matter.
00:44:47.320 --> 00:44:53.960
And they would not do away with this, even though, oh my God, if you hear that shark song one more time, you're gonna commit suicide.
00:44:53.960 --> 00:44:57.000
It's just, oh, you may not have that shark song in England.
00:44:57.000 --> 00:45:03.639
A lot of Winds Mattering Project may require boredom, all sorts of unpleasant experiences.
00:45:03.639 --> 00:45:09.559
So not so much happiness, but that sense of meaningfulness, flourishing, eudaimonia.
00:45:09.960 --> 00:45:16.200
And yeah, I think for that reason this book is essential reading for all humanists, if not all humans.
00:45:16.200 --> 00:45:21.559
So again, it's the mattering instinct, how our deepest longing drives us and divides us.
00:45:21.559 --> 00:45:25.639
Thank you once again, not just for this, Rebecca, but for your all of your contributions.
00:45:25.639 --> 00:45:28.200
It's been a real honor to speak with you.
00:45:28.200 --> 00:45:36.920
And before we go, we have our standard closing question, which is what's something which you've changed your mind on recently and what prompted that change?
00:45:39.559 --> 00:45:48.840
Yeah, I actually this work, uh one of the things I I most changed my mind about is was if it's transcenders.
00:45:48.840 --> 00:46:29.079
That I have more uh sympathy uh f for them, and I think if society offered more ways that there would be enough mattering to go around, which would be a a big change, that that perhaps there won't be as many uh transcenders, but uh the way in which we ought to talk to religious believers, and I've really I would never ever commit to a public debate again, this kind of tug of war.
00:46:29.079 --> 00:46:32.200
That's a big change for me.
00:46:32.200 --> 00:46:43.079
And it's to understand it's not just it's not that they're not getting it, and how can they be convinced by these weak arguments?
00:46:43.079 --> 00:46:46.679
It's not really about arguments, it's really about mattering.
00:46:46.679 --> 00:46:49.400
So I I could I've really changed my mind about that.
00:46:49.800 --> 00:46:52.920
Rebecca Goldstein, thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now.
00:46:53.639 --> 00:46:54.280
Thank you.
00:46:54.280 --> 00:46:55.559
It's been a pleasure.
00:46:55.960 --> 00:46:58.360
Thanks for listening to this episode of Humanism Now.
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00:47:13.159 --> 00:47:19.639
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00:00:51.519 --> 00:00:56.399
Welcome to Humanism Now, a podcast about secular ethics, curiosity, and compassion.
00:00:56.399 --> 00:00:58.399
I'm your host, James Hodgson.
00:00:58.399 --> 00:01:03.920
My guest today is Rebecca Goldstein, philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow.
00:01:03.920 --> 00:01:12.400
She's the author of books including The Mind-Body Problem, Incompleteness, Betraying Spinoza, and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.
00:01:12.400 --> 00:01:20.560
In 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, and she's been named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.
00:01:20.560 --> 00:01:25.280
Rebecca will also be the keynote speaker at the World Humanist Congress in Ottawa this August.
00:01:25.280 --> 00:01:33.599
And I'm delighted to welcome her ahead of that conference to discuss her latest book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.
00:01:33.599 --> 00:01:39.680
A book about what it means to matter and why that need shapes so much of our human lives.
00:01:39.680 --> 00:01:42.319
Rebecca Goldstein, welcome to Humanism Now.
00:01:43.039 --> 00:01:44.799
Well, it's a pleasure to be here.
00:01:44.799 --> 00:01:53.519
I ought to just add that book 36 Arguments for the Existence of God had a subtitle, which was a work of fiction.
00:01:54.879 --> 00:01:57.840
Yes, probably best for this audience to clarify that.
00:01:58.400 --> 00:02:02.000
It was really interesting when I was on book tour with that.
00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:13.840
When I went down south in the US, that subtitle was in How It and I would get the true believers, and it led to some very interesting dialogue, actually.
00:02:14.479 --> 00:02:20.639
Yeah, well, I would imagine a book titled That Way Around is more likely to get intrigue than the other way around, perhaps.
00:02:20.639 --> 00:02:27.840
But the latest book is about mattering, and it's a fantastic, brilliant work that I would recommend to all humanists, certainly.
00:02:27.840 --> 00:02:29.199
There's so much in there.
00:02:29.199 --> 00:02:35.280
But I'd be fascinated to know about the genesis of this book.
00:02:35.280 --> 00:02:43.680
How do you even start to approach addressing a concept as broad and as deep as mattering?
00:02:44.319 --> 00:02:55.039
I really had to ease into it because you know my background is in analytic philosophy and particularly philosophy of science, philosophy of math.
00:02:55.039 --> 00:03:04.560
And those who have been trained in analytic philosophy tend to like problems that can be analyzed and very precisely.
00:03:04.560 --> 00:03:09.599
And so, as you say, this is very broad, it's very existential.
00:03:09.599 --> 00:03:20.800
That's just not the way I had been trained or was inclined to go, certainly in my early philosophical career.
00:03:20.800 --> 00:03:26.240
But I do this thing of occasionally writing novels.
00:03:26.240 --> 00:03:29.760
And it's a form I I love.
00:03:29.760 --> 00:03:33.280
I love to read them and I very much enjoy writing them.
00:03:33.280 --> 00:03:43.840
And in my very first novel, which was called The Mind-Body Problem, and that's of course a classic problem in philosophy of mind, now call it the heart problem of consciousness.
00:03:43.840 --> 00:03:54.159
I had this character, and the editor who had acquired it had asked me in our first conversation, I don't understand your main character.
00:03:54.159 --> 00:03:57.680
She's very attractive, she's very sexually desirable.
00:03:57.680 --> 00:03:59.360
That gets a lot of the pluck going.
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She's she's very bright, she's very funny, she's so unhappy.
00:04:03.439 --> 00:04:07.599
She's always teetering on the cusp of despair.
00:04:07.599 --> 00:04:08.560
Why?
00:04:08.560 --> 00:04:11.200
And it's true, I felt that about her.
00:04:11.200 --> 00:04:17.599
Her very the very first line she spoke to me out of the blue was, I'm often asked what it's like to be married to a genius.
00:04:17.599 --> 00:04:22.800
And I knew this was a character, then and I wrote the novel to find out who this was.
00:04:22.800 --> 00:04:26.959
But that was a very discontented voice.
00:04:26.959 --> 00:04:33.439
And I thought about it for weeks on end, and then I decided, oh, she doesn't feel like she matters.
00:04:33.439 --> 00:04:34.879
Yes, she's very attractive.
00:04:34.879 --> 00:04:36.800
Yes, she's very bright.
00:04:36.800 --> 00:04:41.039
And yes, that could be happening in my house at any moment.
00:04:41.039 --> 00:04:50.159
Yes, she is um, you know, funny and all that, but that's not what most matters to her, you know, what most matters to her is something else.
00:04:50.159 --> 00:04:58.079
And so it sort of glommed onto her in her life in the strange way you are when you write a novel.
00:04:58.079 --> 00:05:01.519
You're not quite yourself, you're half this character.
00:05:01.519 --> 00:05:11.279
We sort of collaborated and she came up with this idea of the mattering map, that there are different ways that we try to prove to ourselves that we matter.
00:05:11.279 --> 00:05:23.359
And had she inhabited a location where being very seductive and having any man you want mattered to her, most mattered to her, she'd be content.
00:05:23.359 --> 00:05:25.599
But that's not where she resided.
00:05:25.599 --> 00:05:40.159
And that just seemed interesting to me, but I put it away, published the novel, put it away, got back to my real work, and other academics, other writers started to take up this notion of the mattering map.
00:05:40.159 --> 00:05:50.000
A behavioral economist wrote an essay, an article published in Harvard Business Review, quoting my main character about this matter.
00:05:50.000 --> 00:05:53.919
And some feminists and some cultural critics took this up.
00:05:53.919 --> 00:06:03.120
And then I thought, oh, well, maybe this has broader applications than just explaining this character to me.
00:06:03.120 --> 00:06:10.719
And so I began to think about it very seriously and to have to do lots and lots of interviews with people all over the place.
00:06:10.719 --> 00:06:13.359
Just I didn't think I would write a book about it.
00:06:13.359 --> 00:06:17.359
It seemed too broad, too mushy to tackle.
00:06:17.359 --> 00:06:22.719
And just I saw its implications everywhere, and that made me shy away from it.
00:06:22.719 --> 00:06:27.919
It was during COVID that I thought our society is really coming apart at the seams.
00:06:27.919 --> 00:06:31.279
We are fighting with each other over everything.
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Does this mattering instinct have something to do with this, this great existential need to prove to ourselves that we objectively matter?
00:06:41.359 --> 00:06:46.000
During COVID, you sat down to decide to write it, particularly about how society is coming apart at the scenes.
00:06:47.839 --> 00:06:54.479
That we are just finding more and more ways of getting all worked up and angry and hostile.
00:06:54.479 --> 00:06:56.079
What is going on?
00:06:56.079 --> 00:07:05.120
And I do think that the closeness of death, this uncontrollable at this point virus was sweeping through us.
00:07:05.120 --> 00:07:10.560
We didn't know how to how to fight it, and it made us feel so vulnerable.
00:07:10.560 --> 00:07:18.639
And clinging all the more to whatever we felt convinced us that yes, our lives have mattered.
00:07:18.639 --> 00:07:20.399
This was not for waste.
00:07:20.399 --> 00:07:24.399
This was not for nothing, this life that might be stuffed out at any moment.
00:07:24.399 --> 00:07:26.879
I think it intensifies that.
00:07:51.679 --> 00:07:51.919
Yes.
00:07:51.919 --> 00:07:55.359
And it's it, as you say, it's soft and mushy, so it's the opposite of physical matter.
00:07:55.359 --> 00:07:58.000
We're talking this is the other side of matter.
00:07:58.560 --> 00:07:58.959
Yes.
00:07:58.959 --> 00:08:08.799
That word matter in English is so rich, it's so amazing, that I can sum up what I think our species is.
00:08:08.799 --> 00:08:12.639
We are creatures of matter who long to matter.
00:08:12.639 --> 00:08:19.679
And one of the strongest manifestations of this is people who deny that we are matter.
00:08:19.839 --> 00:08:20.159
Yeah.
00:08:20.399 --> 00:08:24.639
Like, because how could we truly matter if all we are is matter?
00:08:24.639 --> 00:08:28.319
So I mean you can express this in English quite nicely.
00:08:28.959 --> 00:08:29.839
Yes, yeah, yeah.
00:08:29.839 --> 00:08:33.279
It's a nice coincidence that you have the the word has that dual meaning for sure.
00:08:33.279 --> 00:08:44.639
And I think you mentioned early on that it's it is one of the, if not the core differentiators of us with the rest of the animal kingdom, this longing to matter.
00:08:44.639 --> 00:08:50.480
So what do you see are the roots of this need for humans?
00:08:51.120 --> 00:08:51.600
Yes.
00:08:51.600 --> 00:08:55.440
So should I go all the way back to entropy?
00:08:56.480 --> 00:09:00.080
Please start with entropy, because I I that chapter was yeah, was fascinating.
00:09:00.720 --> 00:09:05.519
So so yes, entropy is and I you don't have to believe me about this.
00:09:05.519 --> 00:09:09.360
You can believe people like Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein.
00:09:09.360 --> 00:09:12.960
It is the supreme law of physics.
00:09:12.960 --> 00:09:14.960
It is the law of physics.
00:09:14.960 --> 00:09:20.240
We know that no matter what we go on to discover, we'll never be falsified.
00:09:20.240 --> 00:09:22.559
That is only true of this law.
00:09:22.559 --> 00:09:25.439
And I try to somewhat explain this.
00:09:25.439 --> 00:09:30.559
It so much depends on the just the mathematics of probability, entropy.
00:09:30.559 --> 00:09:36.720
But entropy is, you know, that things go toward chaos, toward disorder.
00:09:36.720 --> 00:09:46.799
If you leave your house for several months, you come back, there's dust all over.
00:09:46.799 --> 00:09:48.079
There is disorder.
00:09:48.079 --> 00:09:54.319
That is the natural tendency of things that go towards this disorder.
00:09:54.319 --> 00:09:59.919
And all the laws of biology really are derivable from this.
00:09:59.919 --> 00:10:02.159
It's resistance to entropy.
00:10:02.159 --> 00:10:04.399
Life demands order.
00:10:04.399 --> 00:10:18.399
And so all biological systems have to take in great amount of energy to resist entropy, and they they create entropy, it's dissipated into the environment.
00:10:18.399 --> 00:10:33.039
So I like to tell my students, life makes a mess, some lives more than others, and we make a great deal of mess, our our species, and some among us make more mess than others.
00:10:33.039 --> 00:10:35.600
Anyway, so this is true of all life.
00:10:35.600 --> 00:10:48.879
The resistance to entropy, which demands for those creatures who have attention, a tremendous amount of attention focused on the self, you know, on one's own well-being and flourishing.
00:10:48.879 --> 00:11:16.720
We are the creatures because of these amazing objects that we carry around in these craniums, this most sophisticated object that has yet been discovered in the universe, this brain, comes with a capacity for self-reflection, that we can step outside of ourselves and regard ourselves with some degree of objectivity and ask, am I truly deserving of all this attention?
00:11:16.720 --> 00:11:22.000
Which I absolutely have to, by the laws of nature, it just comes automatically by default.
00:11:22.000 --> 00:11:27.120
I have to lavish on myself incessant attention.
00:11:27.120 --> 00:11:31.919
Who am I to devote so much of my attention to myself?
00:11:31.919 --> 00:11:43.679
If the measurement of how much one thinks something matters, which I tend to think means deserving of attention, that's the measure of how much I think something matters is how much attention I devote to it.
00:11:43.679 --> 00:11:47.039
It would follow that I think I matter more than anything else in the universe.
00:11:47.039 --> 00:11:50.000
And short of lunacy, none of us think that, right?
00:11:50.000 --> 00:12:03.439
This is that extra self-reflective, justificatory aspect that comes into being a human that supplies us with this existential dimension.
00:12:03.439 --> 00:12:07.279
So this is pretty great that we humans have this.
00:12:07.279 --> 00:12:14.319
We want not only to automatically feel that we are of value, we want somehow to prove it to ourselves.
00:12:14.319 --> 00:12:31.039
And I would go so far as to say, since I don't believe in any kind of transcendent being who gives us value, that we're bringing, just by this question, by being human, by this self-justificatory question, we're bringing values into the universe.
00:12:31.039 --> 00:12:32.399
That's pretty damn good.
00:12:32.399 --> 00:12:35.039
Hooray for us, hooray for the human species.
00:12:35.039 --> 00:12:36.959
They could be very bad values.
00:12:36.959 --> 00:12:37.840
Yes.
00:12:37.840 --> 00:12:41.840
But nevertheless, they're something estimable.
00:12:42.240 --> 00:12:45.840
And we'll come back to that, I think, when we dive into the mattering map for sure.
00:12:46.240 --> 00:12:46.720
Exactly.
00:12:47.039 --> 00:13:00.399
But I really liked this framing in the book of mattering as resistance to entropy and our sort of knowledge of that and our own it becomes from our self-awareness and our our desires.
00:13:00.399 --> 00:13:12.079
But I'm interested, you mentioned COVID earlier, and I think one of the other reasons why we saw this kind of breakdown in society for a lot of people was the realization that no one was in control.
00:13:12.079 --> 00:13:14.959
And I think that's very closely tied again to entropy.
00:13:14.959 --> 00:13:22.159
This was a a natural phenomenon which we tried to, and eventually, of course, we did manage to get a grip on as a society.
00:13:22.159 --> 00:13:33.279
But again, this is why we had a lot of conspiracy theories, you had a lot of anti-science coming out, you had a lot of, and you say there was this tearing apart of society because people wanted to associate blame and they were scared.
00:13:33.279 --> 00:13:34.799
And it really came from that lack of control.
00:13:34.799 --> 00:13:42.959
Do you see a connection between mattering and a the desire for mattering and a desire to have some level of control over our lives?
00:13:44.319 --> 00:13:45.360
Yeah, absolutely.
00:13:45.360 --> 00:13:45.759
Yeah.
00:13:45.759 --> 00:13:47.199
Yes, no, absolutely.
00:13:47.199 --> 00:13:50.319
It's very they're very tied up with each other.
00:13:50.319 --> 00:13:58.879
This whole self-reflective step that we can take, it is we have a conception of ourselves.
00:13:58.879 --> 00:14:01.840
We have a conception of ourselves as agents.
00:14:01.840 --> 00:14:08.079
And that is so important for our sense of mattering, that we are the agents of our actions.
00:14:08.079 --> 00:14:12.079
We are yeah, so very, very much tied together.
00:14:12.799 --> 00:14:19.279
And I was pleased to see uh very prominent atheist Spinoza plays quite a large role in the book as well.
00:14:19.279 --> 00:14:22.799
What can Spinoza teach us about mattering?
00:14:23.840 --> 00:14:26.480
Yeah, so two ways, I think.
00:14:26.480 --> 00:14:28.959
So I taught Spinoza for many years.
00:14:28.959 --> 00:14:35.759
It is my favorite thing to he certainly my favorite historical philosopher to teach.
00:14:35.759 --> 00:14:51.759
And it's a voyage with the class to bring them through what seems an impenetrable and totally impersonal work, the ethics, his magnum opus, and to see what happens when they start to make their way into it and how it changes them.
00:14:51.759 --> 00:14:53.199
It's interesting.
00:14:53.199 --> 00:15:04.399
He, of course, wanted to put ethics on a purely secular grounding, and we called his magnum opus the ethics, right?
00:15:04.399 --> 00:15:08.639
And so this was the great work that ceded the Enlightenment.
00:15:08.639 --> 00:15:13.519
And you know, it took 100 years, but he became a major figure during the Enlightenment.
00:15:13.519 --> 00:15:23.840
So but the grounding of ethics on something objective, not on different people's views about what this supernatural deity wants from us.
00:15:23.840 --> 00:15:39.759
But he also, in the course of trying to derive his ethics, and it is, of course, ambitiously claims to be a deductive work, to start with certain premises and then to deduce a la Euclid theorems ending with ethics.
00:15:39.759 --> 00:15:44.000
So a very strong claim that you can deduce aught from is.
00:15:44.000 --> 00:16:00.079
But he introduces this concept of conitas, which is this striving to persist in a thing's own being and to flourish, a striving to persist and to thrive.
00:16:00.079 --> 00:16:02.319
To survive and to thrive, to actually.
00:16:02.319 --> 00:16:20.959
And it's almost as if he implicitly knew that there was a force, which we now know how to name, entropy, against which we must constantly be striving, and that requires so much attention and energy.
00:16:20.959 --> 00:16:33.360
And so that was very, very important to me, and it plays a very important role in his derivation, this conitas, that there's a striving, and that's what the emotions are all about.
00:16:33.360 --> 00:16:38.000
Trying to assess how well this striving is going in our lives.
00:16:38.000 --> 00:16:43.199
When I hate something, it's because it's militating against my survival and flourishing.
00:16:43.199 --> 00:16:46.000
When I love something, it's it's it's encouraging my stuff.
00:16:46.000 --> 00:16:48.079
This conitas is very important.
00:16:48.079 --> 00:16:49.840
So that was interesting to me.
00:16:49.840 --> 00:16:51.360
He almost had the concept.
00:16:51.360 --> 00:16:55.600
Lurking behind this is something against which we must struggle.
00:16:55.600 --> 00:16:58.240
And we now know how to name that entropy.
00:16:58.240 --> 00:17:17.200
So there's that, and there's also that his great conviction that we can find a way of grounding ethics that we can all agree on because it's going to be something objective, something in the universe, not some something that we speculate about.
00:17:17.200 --> 00:17:32.799
And yeah, so those were, I think, the the two ways that, and I don't know if I hadn't spent all those years, you know, in the Spinoza mindset, whether I would have come to think see entropy in exactly this light.
00:17:32.799 --> 00:17:36.000
Oh, this is the thing lurking in the background.
00:17:36.000 --> 00:17:38.319
This explains so much about us.
00:17:38.880 --> 00:18:31.559
Yeah, and that focus on striving is so interesting, again, from a humanist point of view, because the Amsterdam Declaration, which again, you know, written in Spinoza's home country, where humanism is defined as as best it can be, continually returns to this point of striving, is that humans strive humanists strive to be rational.
00:18:31.559 --> 00:18:34.120
We strive to find meaning.
00:18:34.120 --> 00:18:49.720
And I think it's such an important word, and but I think the way you've laid it out there really explains why it's such a humanist ethic to strive, and as you say, striving against entropy, but also not claim that to ever have got there, but for it to to be a constant struggle against the natural forces.
00:18:50.279 --> 00:18:50.680
Yeah.
00:18:50.680 --> 00:19:03.480
But and so we have to do this, and it's really can be derived, you know, we're biological creatures, and biology is really living creatures' answer to entropy.
00:19:03.480 --> 00:19:05.720
Of course, we're gonna lose the struggle.
00:19:05.720 --> 00:19:06.519
All things will.
00:19:06.519 --> 00:19:09.559
The universe itself will lose, right?
00:19:09.559 --> 00:19:13.799
The universe itself will end in a state of maximum entropy.
00:19:13.799 --> 00:19:20.120
But meanwhile, we struggle, and sometimes the struggle is good and sometimes it's not so good.
00:19:20.200 --> 00:19:31.640
Aaron Ross Powell And on the universe, I was also intrigued to hear a physicist, I believe, or certainly a a scientist in Boltzmann being again quite a big part of the story.
00:19:31.640 --> 00:19:39.880
So um, yeah, could you explain how Boltzmann has contributed to the our concept of mattering?
00:19:40.840 --> 00:19:43.000
Well, I mean, Boltzmidge is a tragic thing.
00:19:43.000 --> 00:19:44.440
I love tragic figures.
00:19:44.440 --> 00:19:46.519
That's a novel, probably.
00:19:46.519 --> 00:19:54.360
But people who it Spinoza is one and Boltzmann is another, who presented their ideas too soon.
00:19:54.360 --> 00:20:01.000
It took their peers, the rest of humanity, a long time to catch up.
00:20:01.000 --> 00:20:04.519
Um Spinoza, yeah, took a really long time to catch up.
00:20:04.519 --> 00:20:11.080
I think we're still trying to catch up with Spinoza, and we humanists are we are the descendants of Spinoza.
00:20:11.080 --> 00:20:12.120
Baltzman.
00:20:12.120 --> 00:20:14.200
Baltzman explained entropy.
00:20:14.200 --> 00:20:18.840
He really explained what is going on here.
00:20:18.840 --> 00:20:26.680
Why is there this tendency toward chaos to unraveling, towards destruction?
00:20:26.680 --> 00:20:37.640
And how can evolution, which is um we evolved in greater and greater complexity, how can this be explained in the face of entropy?
00:20:37.640 --> 00:20:39.480
What is entropy all about?
00:20:39.480 --> 00:20:49.880
And there's this great, I don't know how how deeply you want me to quantify, but there's a great entropy means that processes are irreversible, right?
00:20:49.880 --> 00:21:01.000
So that if I crack an egg and scramble it up and make an omelet, if I were to film that and run it backwards, that would be ridiculous, right?
00:21:01.000 --> 00:21:03.320
Everybody would know this is but run backwards.
00:21:03.320 --> 00:21:05.320
This can only go in one direction.
00:21:05.320 --> 00:21:09.799
And beating up an egg is creating more entropy of the egg.
00:21:09.799 --> 00:21:12.440
It's less order.
00:21:12.440 --> 00:21:20.360
But on the microscopic level, if you just look at the molecules moving around, it's reversible.
00:21:20.360 --> 00:21:21.880
It's completely reversible.
00:21:21.880 --> 00:21:27.240
If you film it and you run it backwards, nobody could detect that it was run backwards.
00:21:27.240 --> 00:21:31.400
But the macroscopic is just composed of the microscopic.
00:21:31.400 --> 00:21:41.320
So how can irreversibility have come out of reversibility of the microscopic laws that are completely reversible?
00:21:41.320 --> 00:21:42.920
And he answered that.
00:21:42.920 --> 00:21:45.799
But it wasn't understood in his time.
00:21:45.799 --> 00:21:51.720
And he So here's another way, he felt like he didn't matter.
00:21:51.720 --> 00:22:10.039
He didn't get, you know, he knew he had solved a really important problem, but he felt like he didn't matter, that nobody would ever accept it, that he was not going to contribute to scientific knowledge, and that to his that his life had been a waste.
00:22:10.039 --> 00:22:12.759
And he ended up committing suicide.
00:22:12.759 --> 00:22:16.920
It there were two ways in which the Boltzmann story.
00:22:16.920 --> 00:22:20.279
He's really a very, I love Boltzmann very much.
00:22:20.279 --> 00:22:27.799
He's a very poignant figure, and he did this magnificent work, and he had told us that this is what he wanted to do.
00:22:27.799 --> 00:22:41.160
Some people feel like they matter because they have power and they have money, and that all he wanted was to contribute to the growth of scientific knowledge, and nobody recognized that he had.
00:22:41.160 --> 00:22:46.759
And yeah, it's not that he wanted status, he wanted to be a contributor.
00:22:46.759 --> 00:22:51.559
But to be a contributor, others must recognize your contribution.
00:22:51.559 --> 00:22:55.240
So it wasn't like the status, it wasn't the fame, it wasn't all that.
00:22:55.240 --> 00:22:57.240
It was to be a contributor.
00:22:57.799 --> 00:23:09.240
And that sets us up nicely, as you say, because it really is as much about where the individual is looking for mattering as to how their life actually unfolds.
00:23:09.240 --> 00:23:20.200
And it for Boltzmann, he was just wasn't getting that recognition, that affiliation, the accreditation that he probably knew his work deserved, and the satisfaction of the work alone wasn't sufficient for him.
00:23:20.200 --> 00:23:24.440
And so I think that sets up nicely to introduce the mattering map.
00:23:24.440 --> 00:23:31.400
So could you talk us through the different ways in which humans find and rate mattering?
00:23:31.880 --> 00:23:32.200
Yeah.
00:23:32.200 --> 00:23:38.360
So, you know, as I say, the germ of this went back to this fictional creature and uh character.
00:23:38.360 --> 00:23:48.759
And I was, you know, impressed by the fact that different people, that we all share this need to somehow prove to ourselves, right?
00:23:48.759 --> 00:24:02.039
It's really about ourselves, to be able to live in an easy relationship with ourselves, that we have to somehow be able to justify ourselves that we're living a meaningful life.
00:24:02.039 --> 00:24:09.559
And I think this is true even of the people who are living the most preposterously preposterous lives or evil lives.
00:24:09.559 --> 00:24:11.640
That yes, they too share this.
00:24:11.640 --> 00:24:13.720
To be human is to have this aspect.
00:24:13.720 --> 00:24:15.720
But we do it in such very different ways.
00:24:15.720 --> 00:24:18.120
And so, you know, I was just observing it.
00:24:18.120 --> 00:24:20.279
It's very, very interesting to me.
00:24:20.279 --> 00:24:28.680
Example, I was once sitting in a hotel lobby in Manhattan waiting for a friend who is habitually late.
00:24:28.680 --> 00:24:35.000
And a guy comes up to me this many years ago, comes up to me, he's pestering me, blah, blah, blah.
00:24:35.000 --> 00:24:36.279
This, all this stuff.
00:24:36.279 --> 00:24:37.640
You know, he's trying to pick me up.
00:24:37.640 --> 00:24:42.360
And so I started to talk to him about his life.
00:24:42.360 --> 00:24:45.240
What gives him the impetus to go on?
00:24:45.240 --> 00:24:46.920
What does he think his life is all about?
00:24:46.920 --> 00:24:52.920
It turned out he was, and it was the first time I had heard the this phrase, he was a pickup artist.
00:24:52.920 --> 00:24:54.519
This was what his life was about.
00:24:54.519 --> 00:24:55.640
He picked up women.
00:24:55.640 --> 00:24:58.120
He had his stats, he had his heroes.
00:24:58.120 --> 00:25:01.080
There were books on this, how to do it effectively.
00:25:01.080 --> 00:25:04.039
So this was where he was on the mattering map.
00:25:04.039 --> 00:25:06.360
This was what I called, you know, this was his mattering project.
00:25:06.360 --> 00:25:07.480
It was fascinating to me.
00:25:07.480 --> 00:25:09.559
So I just I talked to people about this.
00:25:09.559 --> 00:25:11.320
It's really interesting.
00:25:11.320 --> 00:25:17.480
And then I started to think during COVID when uh I was thinking, are there patterns here?
00:25:17.480 --> 00:25:26.360
So here's this pickup artist, here's Boltzmann, here's Spinoza, here's me, here's my my friends, novelists, thinkers, all sorts of people.
00:25:26.360 --> 00:25:31.880
The grandma who devotes herself to her children, bringing up her children, so whatever.
00:25:31.880 --> 00:25:33.240
Yeah, there are patterns.
00:25:33.240 --> 00:25:45.480
And I just, you know, I think this is again, it's an empirical hypothesis based on my over 40 years of talking to people about this, it's open to falsification.
00:25:45.480 --> 00:25:47.640
But so far, people have thrown things at me.
00:25:47.640 --> 00:25:49.799
I don't think I have found it falsified yet.
00:25:49.799 --> 00:25:53.720
So there are these four general strategies, I think.
00:25:53.720 --> 00:26:00.519
And I call them the transcenders, the heroic strivers, the socializers, and the competitors.
00:26:00.519 --> 00:26:22.360
And what I have found that when I bring up this mattering thing, whether I'm in a faculty meeting, you know, at Harvard, which has happened, or I'm talking to somebody who's trying to pick me up, how a person understands these questions tell me a lot about whether they're a transcender, a heroic striver, a competitor, or a socializer.
00:26:22.360 --> 00:26:56.200
I'll start with the transcenders, because I think for most of most of our history, at least since the axial age, when we had the leisure to think about this kind, these sort of questions, what is, you know, that life was stable enough that we could think about what are we living for, which happened beginning about 800 BCE to about 200 BCE, when all of the religious frameworks and Western philosophy were generated, that from ever since that most people have been transcenders.
00:26:56.200 --> 00:27:16.279
And that is what we humanists do not believe in, that there is some transcendent being, something metaphysical outside of space, time, and the laws of nature that created those laws of nature, created everything, created the physical order without and the moral order within.
00:27:16.279 --> 00:27:24.120
And that and created us purposefully and intentionally, and we have a role to play or we wouldn't be here.
00:27:24.120 --> 00:27:26.279
And that's what our lives are about.
00:27:26.279 --> 00:27:28.360
And those are transcenders.
00:27:28.360 --> 00:27:38.039
And I must say that the transcenders with whom I've spoken, and I know what it feels like to be a transcender because I was born into a very religious household, Orthodox Jewish.
00:27:38.039 --> 00:27:47.400
And so for the first 13 years of my life, this is the way I thought about my life, that transcenders have a very robust sense of mattering, right?
00:27:47.400 --> 00:27:55.880
You know, they matter to that whose mattering can't be doubted if it were to exist, that which created everything from nothing.
00:27:55.880 --> 00:28:03.000
So, short of lunacy, there is no greater sense of mattering than to be a transcender.
00:28:03.000 --> 00:28:06.120
And it's not surprising that so many people are.
00:28:06.120 --> 00:28:12.440
And transcenders with whom I have had long discussions, they said to me, I just don't understand what gets you out of bed in the morning.
00:28:12.440 --> 00:28:15.480
How can how can you feel like your life has any meaning?
00:28:15.480 --> 00:28:16.600
So that's interesting.
00:28:16.600 --> 00:28:18.840
And that's really interesting to me, right?
00:28:18.840 --> 00:28:23.000
It shows what we're not up against, but it explains.
00:28:23.000 --> 00:28:31.880
It explains some very deep difference between us non-believers and believers, and why it's yes, so emotionally fraught.
00:28:32.360 --> 00:28:34.440
And why often we talk past each other as well.
00:28:34.440 --> 00:28:39.400
When you see a lot of these debates, there really is a disconnect, I think.
00:28:39.400 --> 00:28:47.559
And that's been put down to lots of things, but I think the mattering, viewing it through the let the lens of the uh what oh how people matter.
00:28:47.559 --> 00:28:49.480
Sorry, I think it paused there.
00:28:49.480 --> 00:28:50.279
Are you okay?
00:28:50.279 --> 00:28:51.320
Can you hear me?
00:28:51.320 --> 00:28:51.960
Okay.
00:28:51.960 --> 00:28:53.799
Yeah, sorry, just pause for a second there.
00:28:53.799 --> 00:28:54.519
Beg pardon.
00:28:54.519 --> 00:29:10.360
Yeah, so yeah, when you watch debates on this, it it really is people talking past each other and it and viewing it through this sense of what matters or what where they think that sense of mattering comes from, you suddenly realize why there is this disconnect between, as you say, transcenders.
00:29:11.240 --> 00:29:16.519
And I think it could make us so much more effective if we understood this.
00:29:16.519 --> 00:29:18.600
This was also a great motivation.
00:29:18.600 --> 00:29:25.400
It's don't come at people with you these abstract arguments and that it's make them feel stupid that we're so much.
00:29:25.400 --> 00:29:30.680
But that nothing will get the defenses up more than that.
00:29:30.680 --> 00:29:36.759
But come to them if our come to all of us, our shared humanity.
00:29:36.759 --> 00:29:43.160
That this longing that we all have to prove to ourselves is shared.
00:29:43.160 --> 00:29:52.759
And and yes, so that was to me so important because I've been in debates, I've been, we knock against each other, it's horrible.
00:29:53.240 --> 00:29:57.559
Is it a s purely a sense of service or is there more to it?
00:29:57.559 --> 00:30:00.680
Like service to the greater good, greater power?
00:30:05.000 --> 00:30:12.519
I couldn't possibly be here unless I have a role to play in the narrative of eternity, right?
00:30:12.519 --> 00:30:14.440
And that's crazy from my point.
00:30:14.440 --> 00:30:17.080
That's but what a sense of mattering.
00:30:17.080 --> 00:30:27.559
And so it's no wonder that you know, that transgenders will say to me, I just I just don't understand how you pursue your life.
00:30:27.559 --> 00:30:30.519
What gives you what keeps you going?
00:30:30.519 --> 00:30:35.720
And I think it's just really important to to get in touch with that.
00:30:35.720 --> 00:30:41.799
I I'm happy that I was born into the family that I was born into, because I really know what that feels like.
00:30:41.799 --> 00:30:46.120
And I know what it felt like when I decided I could no longer believe in this.
00:30:46.120 --> 00:30:49.720
But it was like, okay, so what do I do with my life now?
00:30:50.120 --> 00:30:57.240
If you don't mind me asking then, looking back, do you think there was an immediate replacement sense of mattering that you could step into?
00:30:57.240 --> 00:31:10.360
Or was that then a sense of searching for where, but even though you probably you you hadn't come up with the theory yet, but do you think you did go through a process, the go through the process of thinking, okay, where am I finding meaning and mattering in life?
00:31:12.200 --> 00:31:15.320
Yeah, no, I think I didn't have the language, of course.
00:31:15.320 --> 00:31:18.440
I was 13 or 12, something like that.
00:31:18.440 --> 00:31:20.600
I didn't have the language for it.
00:31:20.600 --> 00:31:29.960
But but yeah, there was a sense that the universe was less than I thought it was, and that I was less therefore also than I thought I was.
00:31:29.960 --> 00:31:35.799
But the universe seemed drained for me for quite some time.
00:31:35.799 --> 00:31:41.000
I felt like it was less than I had thought, and less beautiful even.
00:31:41.000 --> 00:31:43.240
I came to think entirely differently.
00:31:43.240 --> 00:31:48.840
It's all the more beautiful because it is explained by the laws of nature.
00:31:48.840 --> 00:31:50.840
How beautiful is that.
00:31:50.840 --> 00:31:51.960
That that is.
00:31:51.960 --> 00:32:02.759
But but yeah, there was that almost almost depression, almost, I don't know, or hopelessness or something.
00:32:03.240 --> 00:32:06.279
Are they not are they non non-religious transcendent mattress?
00:32:07.160 --> 00:32:09.160
Spiritual, but not religious, right.
00:32:09.160 --> 00:32:11.320
That there's actually an acronym for it now.
00:32:11.320 --> 00:32:15.559
But that the the mannering is out there in the universe.
00:32:15.559 --> 00:32:18.600
It's some kind of metaphysics.
00:32:18.600 --> 00:32:33.000
And so I'm careful to distinguish it from yes, we can experience this sense of transcendence, a starring height, or art can do it, this sense of being in touch with something greater than one selves.
00:32:33.000 --> 00:32:40.440
But for transcenders, because I'm very interested in how people go about just justifying their own life, their sense of meaning.
00:32:40.440 --> 00:32:48.200
The transcenders I reserve for those who have some sort of metaphysical transempirical belief.
00:32:48.200 --> 00:32:49.880
It's ontological.
00:32:49.880 --> 00:32:58.440
Mattering is ontological, it's out there, it's not just the psychological experience of feeling in touch with something greater.
00:32:58.440 --> 00:33:09.080
I get that when I read a beautiful mathematical proof or something that's like, oh, transcendence, utter beauty, or Boltzmann's explanation of entropy.
00:33:09.080 --> 00:33:16.920
There's, I feel like transcendence, but not in that ontological metaphysical sense, which we humanists are.
00:33:16.920 --> 00:33:18.360
We reject that.
00:33:18.360 --> 00:33:20.840
So we humanists are not transcenters.
00:33:21.400 --> 00:33:27.960
So with the other the the other three broad categories of tra of matter matterers, would we call them?
00:33:28.360 --> 00:33:30.440
Well, matterers are humans, really.
00:33:30.440 --> 00:33:37.320
Socializers are most people understand mattering is mattering to others.
00:33:37.320 --> 00:33:46.360
When I ask that question, they will often by default supply that that prepositional phrase to others.
00:33:46.360 --> 00:33:48.920
And it is we are social creatures.
00:33:48.920 --> 00:33:53.160
We are gregarious creatures, evolved from gregarious creatures.
00:33:53.160 --> 00:33:58.840
And yeah, we need to have people in our lives to whom we matter, whether we deserve it or not.
00:33:58.840 --> 00:34:00.519
That's what my family is.
00:34:00.519 --> 00:34:01.799
That's what my friends are.
00:34:01.799 --> 00:34:03.400
They're not j judging me.
00:34:03.400 --> 00:34:05.000
Will they pay attention to me?
00:34:05.000 --> 00:34:06.519
Do I deserve it?
00:34:06.519 --> 00:34:07.960
They will give me attention.
00:34:07.960 --> 00:34:12.440
They are my intimates, they are in my life, colleagues sometimes, this sort of thing.
00:34:12.440 --> 00:34:24.360
But and so in that sense, we're all socializers, but just by by being gregarious creatures and helpless graves, we suffer a very long period of helplessness.
00:34:24.360 --> 00:34:29.080
A giraffe is born, it's immediately struggling to stand up.
00:34:29.080 --> 00:34:32.680
It's we take six months to figure out how to roll over.
00:34:32.680 --> 00:34:36.920
So we are very, we're what's called altrucial.
00:34:36.920 --> 00:34:42.599
It's a long period of dependency on others.
00:34:42.599 --> 00:34:45.400
And that's also due to our great big brains.
00:34:45.400 --> 00:35:07.960
Um if it's hard enough to get these brains out of the birth canal, they so they come out very early, with only a third of them, their normal capacity formed, and it takes until the upper 20s or the lower 20s for the last bit, the adult bit, to finally come at taking responsibility for one's own actions.
00:35:07.960 --> 00:35:19.159
But I reserve the term socializers for those who go about this existential dimension that we have by their relationships with others.
00:35:19.159 --> 00:35:25.559
So to have this relationship with yourself, you need a certain these certain relationships with others.
00:35:25.559 --> 00:35:27.639
The two things are collapsed.
00:35:27.639 --> 00:35:31.159
And there are two, there are so many distinct distinctions.
00:35:31.159 --> 00:35:39.559
It can be relationships with the people who are already in your life, but it could be with total strangers.
00:35:39.559 --> 00:35:47.480
And I've spoken to a lot of people, especially millennials, who really see what mattering is as being famous.
00:35:47.480 --> 00:35:51.480
They want to be paid attention to by a bunch of strangers.
00:35:51.480 --> 00:35:53.639
That's what it is to be a celebrity.
00:35:53.639 --> 00:35:59.400
And that is what they feel will answer this existential need.
00:35:59.400 --> 00:36:06.039
If a lot of strangers are paying attention to them, then clearly they deserve their own attention.
00:36:06.039 --> 00:36:17.159
This also comes in many different shapes and flavors that that socializers maybe we could just pause there on that as well, just to draw that out.
00:36:17.240 --> 00:36:20.440
Because I I wanted to come to this later, but I think it's perfect time to raise it.
00:36:20.440 --> 00:36:26.599
And you mentioned earlier, obviously, about we we started talking about the period during COVID when everybody became kind of hyper online.
00:36:26.599 --> 00:36:30.200
Social media was around before, but it seems like it's taken off in a long way.
00:36:30.200 --> 00:36:39.880
And as you say, a lot of now mattering is attached to, as you say, these parasocial relationships and the numbers and quantities rather than the quality of relationships.
00:36:39.880 --> 00:36:47.079
But I feel like a lot of that is now geared, particularly to news media, but also social media, is telling people they don't matter.
00:36:47.079 --> 00:36:52.200
If you are not one of these, if you are not in the top 1%, then you don't matter.
00:36:52.200 --> 00:36:56.280
Do you feel like is that a new development or through social media?
00:36:56.760 --> 00:36:58.679
It certainly has exacerbated it, right?
00:36:58.679 --> 00:37:01.960
It has something to do with capitalism.
00:37:01.960 --> 00:37:17.480
But that there is a a mattering scheme of that there are some people who matter more than others, the the very wealthy, the very powerful, the very famous, often wrapped up into one and the same people.
00:37:17.480 --> 00:37:19.159
Elon Musk or something.
00:37:19.159 --> 00:37:25.240
And so this is and this we all, no matter who we are, we belong to matter.
00:37:25.240 --> 00:37:37.720
And for this to be out there, that mannering belongs to the very few, and that most of us can't can't even we can't get there.
00:37:37.720 --> 00:37:39.240
We we're not going to be very rich.
00:37:39.240 --> 00:37:49.800
We're not going to be we c maybe famous by for a few minutes on Twitter or something like that, but it's it causes tremendous dissatisfaction and dissatisfaction.
00:37:49.800 --> 00:37:59.159
Delilo had this beautiful line, the novelist DeLillo done Delilo in one of his books, that longing on a large scale is what makes history.
00:37:59.159 --> 00:38:03.079
And I think this is especially true for the longing to matter.
00:38:03.079 --> 00:38:05.240
Longing to matter on a large scale.
00:38:05.240 --> 00:38:14.840
When you have people longing to matter and they can't possibly they can't possibly matter given what's put out there, it makes history.
00:38:14.840 --> 00:38:17.800
I think it's made history very much in the United States.
00:38:17.800 --> 00:38:19.960
It's ripe for demagogues.
00:38:19.960 --> 00:38:23.000
Yeah, I am yours, I am your vengeance.
00:38:23.000 --> 00:38:27.559
For people who have been made to feel that they can't even aspire to matter.
00:38:27.559 --> 00:38:29.720
But also explains a lot about cults.
00:38:29.720 --> 00:38:37.639
And they cults can be religious, they can be political, they can be a terrible combination of both political and religious.
00:38:37.639 --> 00:38:41.480
I the the cult leader matters more than everybody else.
00:38:41.480 --> 00:38:45.000
And to the sense that you're his follower, you matter.
00:38:45.000 --> 00:38:46.920
There's two trickle-down mattering.
00:38:46.920 --> 00:38:51.079
So it can explain so much about what goes wrong when our society.
00:38:51.079 --> 00:38:51.880
Yeah.
00:38:51.880 --> 00:38:55.400
So yeah, totally 100% agree with you.
00:38:56.360 --> 00:39:03.000
You've been very generous with us with your time, but I'd love to get the quick explanation of the final two mattering categories.
00:39:04.519 --> 00:39:05.000
Yeah.
00:39:05.000 --> 00:39:06.519
Heroic strivers.
00:39:06.519 --> 00:39:09.400
It was not mattering to God, it's not mattering to other people.
00:39:09.400 --> 00:39:28.920
Certain standards of excellence, Boltzmann was a great example, a standard of excellence that you want to maybe not satisfy, but to approach, to asymptotically get closer and closer to could be these standards may be intellectual, they may be artistic, they may be athletic, they may be moral.
00:39:28.920 --> 00:39:35.159
Some of the people that I that I profile are atheists who are in some, they're secular sites.
00:39:35.159 --> 00:39:40.280
They try to do is they strive to be better and better moral people.
00:39:40.280 --> 00:39:44.360
But the the this is what it is to be a heroic striver.
00:39:44.360 --> 00:39:56.440
It doesn't have to be, you don't have to break records or a it has to be a striving for you, perfecting yourself because you have something that you think matters, knowledge, beauty, prog justice.
00:39:56.440 --> 00:40:04.760
And that's and you are trying to fulfill this in order to be able to live in an easy relationship with yourself.
00:40:04.760 --> 00:40:08.119
And that's briefly what I mean by a heroic striver.
00:40:08.119 --> 00:40:11.720
And competitors are those who understand mannering.
00:40:11.720 --> 00:40:12.599
It's really interesting.
00:40:12.599 --> 00:40:20.519
They are the people who think that mannering is zero sum.
00:40:20.519 --> 00:40:24.760
To the extent that some matter, they matter less.
00:40:24.760 --> 00:40:26.200
They must matter more.
00:40:26.200 --> 00:40:26.840
They understand.
00:40:26.840 --> 00:40:33.480
They were the people who always became a little uncomfortable when I broached the subject because they hear it as mattering more than.
00:40:33.480 --> 00:40:42.360
And yeah, uh once again, we have certain political leaders who are clear competitors, right?
00:40:42.360 --> 00:40:45.639
They must matter more than in everything.
00:40:45.639 --> 00:40:50.840
One of them can't even accept that he ever lost an election because then he'd be a loser.
00:40:50.840 --> 00:40:52.519
Somebody would matter more than him.
00:40:52.519 --> 00:40:56.679
So it's like it's so out there with certain people.
00:40:56.679 --> 00:41:03.880
One very brief story, even competitors who can be a pain to work with, but they can make great contributions.
00:41:03.880 --> 00:41:05.400
And there is this guy I know.
00:41:05.400 --> 00:41:12.760
I had he's an acquaintance, he's a scientist, he's a very he stood, he's a very good scientist, he won a Nobel Prize.
00:41:12.760 --> 00:41:23.720
Another friend of who who knows him better than I said to me, I'll call him X, X was happy for all of 15 years in his 15 minutes in his whole life.
00:41:23.720 --> 00:41:25.559
There were 15 minutes when he was happy.
00:41:25.559 --> 00:41:26.280
When?
00:41:26.280 --> 00:41:30.360
When he got that call from Stockholm, why was it only 15 minutes?
00:41:30.360 --> 00:41:33.559
Because then he realized other people had also gotten the Nobel Prize.
00:41:33.559 --> 00:41:40.679
So he still had to Yes, it's an exaggeration, but it really captures what a competitor is.
00:41:40.679 --> 00:41:41.960
It's hard to be a competitor.
00:41:42.440 --> 00:41:46.840
And how much of this do you feel, because it seems to be slightly that there's obviously different motivations behind them.
00:41:46.840 --> 00:41:53.880
How much do you think where we fall on the mattering map is in our nature and innate versus nurture?
00:41:53.880 --> 00:42:00.039
Because for competitors, that sounds like a deep probably linked to the dark triad personality trait.
00:42:00.039 --> 00:42:05.320
But for the others, perhaps I wonder if it's more to do with our surroundings and the people that we respect growing up?
00:42:08.039 --> 00:42:16.760
Yeah, but I think also with our our talents, our passions, our temperament, I'm the only one.
00:42:16.920 --> 00:42:17.880
It's been very good.
00:42:18.840 --> 00:42:22.679
Um I love it.
00:42:22.679 --> 00:42:25.559
Yeah, I'm the only one in my family who's not a transcender.
00:42:25.559 --> 00:42:27.880
I was brought up to be a transcender.
00:42:27.880 --> 00:42:34.920
All the people I most loved as I was growing up, and I revered my father, were transcenders.
00:42:34.920 --> 00:42:36.599
And I why I couldn't.
00:42:36.599 --> 00:42:38.679
I couldn't continue to believe in that.
00:42:38.679 --> 00:42:41.159
It's like a mind I was born with with whatever.
00:42:41.159 --> 00:42:44.760
So it's tricky, but it's real, it's so individual.
00:42:44.760 --> 00:42:46.840
It is how we go about this.
00:42:46.840 --> 00:42:49.480
And of course we can change it in the course of our lives.
00:42:49.480 --> 00:42:54.280
It's a hard thing to change, it's an extremely hard thing to change, but sometimes it's not working for us.
00:42:54.280 --> 00:42:57.559
We do not it's not contributing to our flourishing.
00:42:57.559 --> 00:43:12.760
And sometimes it's we realize it's not contributing to the flourishing of others that might matter to us, one hopes it would, or that we that we could be of more value to the world if we changed our location on the mattering map.
00:43:12.760 --> 00:43:14.280
So it's hard to be, you know.
00:43:14.280 --> 00:43:19.400
The friend of mine said he was going to get me a bunch of t-shirts to give out that says it's hard to be human.
00:43:19.400 --> 00:43:23.800
And I think that is also something for us humanists to really bear in mind.
00:43:23.800 --> 00:43:24.920
It's hard.
00:43:24.920 --> 00:43:25.480
Yeah.
00:43:26.200 --> 00:43:35.480
And with that, do you what do you think is the relationship between mattering and happiness or fulfillment in life?
00:43:36.440 --> 00:43:37.720
Yeah, and happiness.
00:43:37.720 --> 00:43:53.400
Yeah, I I prefer the sort of uh notion of eudaimonia from the ancient Greeks, this this notion of flourishing, of well, that I think it's very tied with our dealing with our mattering instinct in a good way, at least for us.
00:43:53.400 --> 00:44:05.800
And and and that could, depending on how you go about it, require a great deal of frustration, of disappointment, of a sense of failure.
00:44:05.800 --> 00:44:13.480
Heroic strivers, right, can often go through tremendous sense of disappointment, of frustration.
00:44:13.480 --> 00:44:25.880
Parents of young children, for example, their episodic happiness, that feeling of that buoyant feeling when the endorphins are flowing, it that might really go down.
00:44:25.880 --> 00:44:35.320
But when you ask them, would you trade your life for a life without children, the oh the majority, even though their happiness has gone down, will say no.
00:44:35.320 --> 00:44:37.800
There are studies that show this to be true.
00:44:37.800 --> 00:44:47.320
So that that's because they feel that what they're doing matters, that this the raising these children to be flourishing individuals matter.
00:44:47.320 --> 00:44:53.960
And they would not do away with this, even though, oh my God, if you hear that shark song one more time, you're gonna commit suicide.
00:44:53.960 --> 00:44:57.000
It's just, oh, you may not have that shark song in England.
00:44:57.000 --> 00:45:03.639
A lot of Winds Mattering Project may require boredom, all sorts of unpleasant experiences.
00:45:03.639 --> 00:45:09.559
So not so much happiness, but that sense of meaningfulness, flourishing, eudaimonia.
00:45:09.960 --> 00:45:16.200
And yeah, I think for that reason this book is essential reading for all humanists, if not all humans.
00:45:16.200 --> 00:45:21.559
So again, it's the mattering instinct, how our deepest longing drives us and divides us.
00:45:21.559 --> 00:45:25.639
Thank you once again, not just for this, Rebecca, but for your all of your contributions.
00:45:25.639 --> 00:45:28.200
It's been a real honor to speak with you.
00:45:28.200 --> 00:45:36.920
And before we go, we have our standard closing question, which is what's something which you've changed your mind on recently and what prompted that change?
00:45:39.559 --> 00:45:48.840
Yeah, I actually this work, uh one of the things I I most changed my mind about is was if it's transcenders.
00:45:48.840 --> 00:46:29.079
That I have more uh sympathy uh f for them, and I think if society offered more ways that there would be enough mattering to go around, which would be a a big change, that that perhaps there won't be as many uh transcenders, but uh the way in which we ought to talk to religious believers, and I've really I would never ever commit to a public debate again, this kind of tug of war.
00:46:29.079 --> 00:46:32.200
That's a big change for me.
00:46:32.200 --> 00:46:43.079
And it's to understand it's not just it's not that they're not getting it, and how can they be convinced by these weak arguments?
00:46:43.079 --> 00:46:46.679
It's not really about arguments, it's really about mattering.
00:46:46.679 --> 00:46:49.400
So I I could I've really changed my mind about that.
00:46:49.800 --> 00:46:52.920
Rebecca Goldstein, thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now.
00:46:53.639 --> 00:46:54.280
Thank you.
00:46:54.280 --> 00:46:55.559
It's been a pleasure.
00:46:55.960 --> 00:46:58.360
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00:46:58.360 --> 00:47:01.400
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