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Spiritual Evolution
A Scientific Defense of Faith
by George Vaillant ’59
(Broadway Books, 2008)

Recently, a 44-year-old Somalian refugee was brought to the clinic by his group home staff, led through the door by the hand. His psychosis had begun in the camps, where he would wander away from the safe zones. Years have passed, his country has changed, and he is wandering still, away from group homes, from hospitals, and from his small family. He repeats words if they are gently said to him, but otherwise speaks only to himself. What he saw in Somalia has caused him to lose his mind.

He was in my mind when I read George Vaillant’s most recent book, Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith. Every psychiatric resident, and any humanist, should know about Vaillant ’59, who has led Harvard’s Study of Adult Development for the past three decades. Based on longitudinal data of the lives of more than 700 men, Vaillant has given us the concept of higher coping defenses and proof that early tragedy need not conscript the future. He is a great and optimistic thinker.

Perhaps because he is aging like the rest of us, Vaillant’s more recent preoccupations have grown wings. He remains optimistic, but now he is thinking less about men and more about mankind. In Spiritual Evolution, he wants to convince the reader that “positive emotions are not just nice to have, they are essential to the survival of Homo sapiens as a species.” He doesn’t expect us to take his word. He presents two hundred pages of proof from genetic, anthropological, and developmental sciences. From every angle, he makes a case for the “strong causal association between positive emotions and post-crisis resilience.” But again I thought, with some doubts, of my patient.

The essential positive emotions Vaillant writes about—neither the American Psychiatric Association nor Freud ever showed much interest in them—are faith, love, hope, joy, forgiveness, compassion, gratitude, and awe. They derive neuro-anatomically from deep limbic and more superficial frontal systems, which have become linked in man through evolution. Unselfish love, for instance, is a limbic product; it evolved in the brain over millennia “to facilitate…attachment, social cohesion and spiritual community.” Hope, on the other hand, is frontal, and a bit more cerebral—it requires a comprehension of time, past and future.

The positive emotions are parasympathetic; vessels dilate, heart rate calms, oxytocin flows. We feel empathic, relaxed, and communal-minded. In contrast, negative emotions such as fear and anger—which some might argue also are essential—cause us to feel cramped and self-serving. They are physiologically catabolic. The woeful restating here is mine—Vaillant uses much greater sophistication and intelligence to lay out the details. Still, we all get the point, and, given a choice, know which feelings we would put our money on.

Each emotion receives a chapter, explaining its many healthful, fruitful facets. It is as if the author is rotating cut diamonds to view them from all angles. This results in some excellent cocktail party facts—for instance, “two tablespoons of gray matter were added [to primate brains] every 100,000 years”—and some lovely poetic notions: “compassion is the desire to separate someone, even if unappealing, from his suffering”; “forgiveness increases steadily from age 3 to age 90.”

But being human, Vaillant writes, we also struggle against ourselves. With the development of language, we gained poetry and logic, science and measurement, at the expense of spirituality or proper regard for these essential feelings. Science itself has had little interest in studying them. And traditional fundamentalist religions have excluded “the amalgam of positive emotions that bind us to other human beings.” Instead, these religions are mostly “dry cognitive questions about patriarchal gods and ‘me,’ ” not the inclusive social communities that will save us.

Any encompassing theory of humanity has to make room for evil. In his book, Vaillant addresses it with brevity, as a force whose time has more or less come and gone. He points out that the Nazis “lasted barely a decade, but after 1,500 years the Benedictine Order is still alive and well.” This may be true, but it made no difference to the victims, or to my own devastated and wandering patient. Natural selection, cultural anthropology, and moral development did nothing for them. That is the sadness of theories. They cannot fit us all.

Vaillant writes with such charisma and personal passion, such optimism after so many decades in the people business, that sometimes Spiritual Evolution teeters on the precipice of self-help. But then he catches himself. “As soon as my writing becomes proscriptive,” he admits, “as soon as I suggest that I know how or why spiritual enlightenment and mystical experiences develop, I have lost my way.”

Ah, I thought with relief, that is the conclusion of a wise man.

Elissa Ely ’88 is a psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center.

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