Awe

As mean egotism fades during wild awe, do we “return to reason”? Do brief doses of wild awe enable us to see our lives and worlds more clearly? In the most general sense, this is true: experiences of awe lead us to a greater awareness of the gaps in our knowledge and to consider more rigorously arguments and evidence. Consider the following study focused on wild awe and reasoning in backpackers out in the backcountry. Some backpackers completed a reasoning task prior to hitting the trails in the wilds of Alaska, Colorado, Washington, and Maine; others did the same reasoning task on the fourth day of the trip. The measure of reasoning was ten items from the Remote Associates Test, in which participants are given sets of three words—e.g., “age,” “mile,” and “sand”—and asked to generate one word that relates to all three. The answer in the example is “stone.” This requires that people find solutions based on diverse kinds of reasoning—noting synonyms, creating compounds of words, and tracking semantic associations. Backpackers on their fourth day out in the backcountry performed 50 percent better on this reasoning task than those hikers just setting out.

Perhaps the most perilous flight from reason today, outside of the denial of human-caused climate crises, is the trend toward polarization in politics. It’s a kind of collective mean egotism. Polarization—viewing ideological and moral issues as matters of a culture war between good and evil people—has risen in the past twenty years as the result of biases in reasoning. We assume that we are reasonable judges of the world, and when we encounter people who have different views than our own, we attribute their views to ideological bias, concluding that they are nothing but wild-eyed, fanatical extremists.

My Berkeley collaborator Daniel Stancato and I wondered whether experiences of wild awe might defuse such polarization. In our study, participants watched either BBC’s Planet Earth or a control video. They then were asked to indicate their own views on one of the most polarizing issues of the times—police brutality. Following this, they placed other U.S. citizens into different camps on the issue and offered estimates of those partisans’ views. Awe led participants to perceive the issue in a less-polarized fashion, meaning that they believed that the gap between their views and those of their opponents to be less vast.

Natural Divine

As we have returned to the outdoors in the spirit of Romanticism, many have found more than the quieting of the default self, healthy body and mind, and sound reason. In-depth interviews reveal that Americans often sense the Divine in nature, and feel that they are near that which is primary, all-encompassing, and good. When looking at the movement of a river, or hearing birdsong, or watching clouds, or sitting quietly amid a stand of trees, people feel as though a benevolent force is animating the life around them, which they are part of. In other research, people reported spiritual experiences in backpacking, birding, rock climbing, and surfing.

Still other evidence suggests that nature may be its own kind of temple, offering innumerable spaces where we might experience what we perceive to be the Divine. In one study, sociologists assessed the natural beauty of each of the 3,100 counties in the United States, in terms of the sun, weather, water, and topographical diversity that the county offered. As a county’s natural wonders rose in abundance, its denizens were less likely to attend church or adhere to a religion’s dogmas. Getting outdoors is its own form of religion, though one that takes people away from the buildings, gatherings, ceremonies, and dogmas of a formalized church.

Getting outdoors is returning us to what Indigenous scholars call traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. TEK is an Indigenous science of our relationship to the natural world, taking varying and local forms in the five thousand or so Indigenous cultures around the world. It has evolved into a cultural belief system, or way of knowing, or science, through tens of thousands of hours of observing flora and fauna, weather systems, the powers of plants, migration patterns of animals, and life cycles; compiling the data; testing hypotheses with empirical evidence and cultural input from elders; and the transmission of knowledge through oral, religious, and pictorial traditions.

Within TEK, species are recognized as interdependent; they are interconnected and collaborating within ecosystems.

All things are animated by a vital life force, spirit, or shared substance. During experiences of wild awe, we may sense that we share a form of consciousness with other species, a thesis tested in studies showing how plants, fungi, flowers, and trees communicate with one another, and even show forms of intentionality, awareness, and, dare one say, kindness toward others.