The power of awe
When I was a kid, I often wondered if I was morally brave, like the people I admired most in real life and in books. Would I risk my own health and safety tending to the sick and dying during a terrible war, like Florence Nightingale? Would I have the spine to hide innocent people in my attic, like Anne Frank’s neighbors did? To stand up to my fellow soldiers participating in a murderous rampage of civilians, on the orders of their commander — like US army officer Hugh Thompson Jr., who tried to stop the My Lai Massacre?
The power of those stories came back to me as I read the new book “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life,” by University of California psychologist Dacher Keltner. As a nature-lover, I expected “Awe” to tell me more about the benefits of being outdoors. And while the book does discuss nature — because witnessing a powerful storm, visiting a place like the Grand Canyon, or even merely seeing exotic plants can stir up wonder — Keltner finds that something else elicits awe in us more often: moral beauty. Most of the 2,600 people he and his team interviewed pointed to other people’s goodness, sacrifice, humility, or inner strength — their moral beauty — when asked to describe an experience of “something vast and mysterious that transcends [their] current understanding of the world.”
In one interview, a South African veteran described watching an officer risk his life to drag a wounded soldier to safety during the Angolan war, which inspired that veteran to break cover and help the heroic officer. An American man spoke about a time when his father, a bartender, told one patron who was trying to intimidate another by using a racial slur to get out of the bar and never come back. A Norwegian talked about how impressed he was by a Yemeni girl, 8 years old, who fought her parents in court after running away from an arranged marriage.
Keltner likens acts of exceptional virtue, character, and vitality to physical beauty. Like physical beauty, he says, behavior “marked by a purity and goodness of intention” often moves us to feelings not only of awe but also of affection and even infatuation.
As I learned from Keltner’s book, awe can affect us in myriad ways that stay with us much longer than we might think they would. Awe often prompts contemplation that is serious, organized, and creative. (Take the awe that Isaac Newton and René Descartes felt after seeing rainbows; it led both thinkers to “some of their best work on mathematics, the physics of light, color theory, and sensation and perception,” Keltner writes). But awe can also move us to immediate, spontaneous action, to our own acts of courage — as it did for the South African veteran.
At a time when we seem to be surrounded by profound and frequent moral ugliness, Keltner’s findings are particularly poignant — because they suggest there’s an alternative to outrage, hatred, and tribalism. We’re living through a disturbing period, when too many people here at home are under the sway of an egomaniacal tyrant, while the dictator who rules Russia tries to grind the Ukrainian people into submission.
And yet these sinister politicians have also inspired striking heroism and moral beauty — most notably right now in the person of Alexei Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya.
Navalny was, of course, one of Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critics. Though he miraculously survived a 2020 poisoning from Novichok — a group of deadly nerve agents — he died in February while serving a long prison sentence at a brutal Arctic penal colony. The news was barely announced before Navalnaya — composed and cogent, despite a face swollen with grief — addressed a gathering of world leaders at the Munich Security Conference.
“I want Putin, his entire entourage, Putin’s friends, his government, to know that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family, to my husband,” she said.
To be married to Navalny — to appear with him in public, to demand his release from the backwoods Russian hospital where he was held after his poisoning while she was surrounded by Russian agents — took backbone. But in the days after losing her 47-year-old husband, Navalnaya went further: She made it clear she plans to take up her husband’s mantle as the leader of the Russian opposition movement, even though she well knows that fighting Putin can be deadly.
I will never manage to be as brave as Navalnaya, which disappoints the child in me who was so impressed by Florence Nightingale and the Nazi resistance. It feels earnest to say that, and earnestness hasn’t been cool in a long time, I know. Yet there is no effective way to respond to evil except with earnestness. Navalnaya’s moral beauty dares me to do more good in the world. Let her dare you, too.