Alain de Botton is a philosopher, writer, and thinker. He is the founder of The School of Life in London, an organization dedicated to helping people find meaning in their lives through the study of psychology, and he is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Telegraph. In this episode, we talk about his career, his work as a thinker, and his thoughts on the decline in the modern world.
00:07:15.820that we're not really used to in the age of museums
00:07:19.420and according to the codes of how to behave in a museum,
00:07:21.700you'd be quickly ushered out by the guards. You're supposed to imbibe art in ways that are,
00:07:28.220you know, one might say chilly, even cold. It's a private experience. It's non-ecstatic.
00:07:33.820It is not done with others. And there's a sort of limit to what we're allowed to expect
00:07:38.500from a work of art. It's both meant to be extremely important and nothing to cry about,
00:07:44.220or indeed dance about. And that strikes me. And I'm intrigued because all societies, I mean,
00:07:49.820take the ancient Greeks who had some fascinating rituals. So once a year, there was the festival
00:07:54.800of Dionysus. Dionysus, the god of wine, the god of night, the god of folly. And he's got his
00:08:02.020ritual moments. And the whole citizenry, especially women, exit the city during the0.85
00:08:08.520festival of Dionysus, dance in ecstatic ways to the beating of drums. And of course, our friend
00:08:14.860Nietzsche here is very interested in this. What's going on here? What are the ancient Greeks
00:08:19.020knowing? What do they know about us that we seem to have forgotten? And I'm not the first person
00:08:24.300to point out that there has been a huge increase, at least in recorded incidents, of what we call
00:08:31.020mental illness, mental unwellness. And one of the ways of thinking about that epidemic of mental
00:08:37.100unwellness is that the extreme emotions, the untenable emotions that manifest themselves now
00:08:44.120privately were, have been in different points in history, marshaled around common rituals,
00:08:52.860which one might say handled them pretty cleverly, quite intelligently. You know, for the ancient
00:08:59.620Greeks, the concept of going a little mad once a year, or perhaps more often, was taken very
00:09:06.120seriously and was not seen, was seen as different from actually being mad. Going mad is something
00:09:13.860that you do because, you know, there's divine madness in each of us. Being mad is a more
00:09:19.100permanent state, often to do with denying the fact that there is divine madness in us. And so,
00:09:25.400you know, the Greeks rather cleverly had these two characters, Apollo and Dionysus at the center
00:09:29.620of their culture. Apollo, interested in reason, in calm, in order, balance, symmetry. And Dionysus,
00:09:36.540very interested in other things. Again, I'm less interested in the specifics of these gods.
00:09:41.340We might find other gods. We might find other festivals. We might look at things differently.
00:09:45.640But there's a methodology there. There's a way of structuring experience, which modern society
00:09:51.220doesn't have. And I'm very interested in drawing attention to that.
00:09:55.160Well, that's very interesting. I think I want to just explore all of that terrain again a little more systematically, just because I'm interested to discover if there's anything we disagree about. I think you and I have been thought to have disagreed. I think your book, Religion for Atheists, came out. When was that?
00:10:16.7602012. So, yeah, about the same time as you were very prominent on what looked like another side.
00:10:22.320I was the foreheaded atheist along with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. And yeah, I think people thought you and I fundamentally disagreed about a few things there. And I'm hearing echoes of that suspicion in what you just said, but I'm not sure I disagree with any of what you said, but I just want to try to figure this out.
00:10:42.680So I think I can completely sign up to the set of claims that I thought I heard, which is that one, secular culture is uncomfortable with ecstasy, right?0.69
00:10:56.580We don't have a frame in which to think about it and integrate it and normalize it and even prioritize it.
00:11:04.900And ecstasy might even be the wrong noun.
00:11:08.140It's more that there's a positive end to the continuum of human well-being that has
00:11:13.800not been well explored, especially in Western culture and especially of late.
00:11:18.960And I very much like your use of the word ecstasy.
00:11:33.400And, you know, even if you think of the nightclub, the nightclub, there are nightclubs all over
00:11:37.760the world, they don't have very high cultural prestige. There's no psychological meaning
00:11:43.320appended to them. There's no transcendental function. They are in the world of fun,
00:11:48.960of recreation, which I think is a real pity. And I think one of the things that the modern world
00:11:54.420does is it misses out on drawing from things like the nightclub, the themes the previous ages
00:12:02.400would have mined in them. So just to add a few pieces to this puzzle for you to work with,
00:12:08.020I think what you're arguing for is that secular culture needs a conception of profundity and the
00:12:15.060sacred that traditionally only religion was able to give us. Totally, totally. That's absolutely
00:12:21.660right. And even, you know, take the concept of the planetarium. So all around the world,
00:12:26.740planetariums, you go and look at stars. How do we justify planetariums? It's overwhelmingly
00:12:31.920to do with scientific explanation rather than or, or A-W-E. In other words, you know, you go to
00:12:39.680planetarium and they're very keen to tell you about the precise dimensions of, you know, Kepler 32b
00:12:44.060and, you know, the rings of Saturn, et cetera, rather than what I think would be an equally
00:12:50.500apposite point, which is how small we are in the universe, you know, ego reduction, which has
00:12:56.720traditionally been one of the functions that religion has taken on very effectively. You know,
00:13:00.640in Zen Buddhism, there were moon viewing ceremonies on platforms. Poetry was read,
00:13:06.140rice cakes were eaten, or still are in some parts of Japan at some points. In other words,
00:13:10.720the moon is being used not as an astronomical phenomenon, but as a sort of psychosocial
00:13:17.560phenomenon, as a tool of culture. And that's very helpful. So if we look at, you know,
00:13:22.800the nightclub, the planetarium, et cetera, there are lots of things that secular culture has,
00:13:28.560but isn't properly connecting up with some of the themes that religions were pretty good
00:13:34.380at bringing to the fore. Well, now, as you, I'm sure, are aware, there's this resurgent interest
00:13:41.000in psychedelics, both on the research end and on the so-called recreational end. And granted,
00:13:48.360there are two very different moods with which one can approach this project. It can be the nightclub
00:13:54.360mood of just having fun or the more contemplative mood of actually trying to understand something
00:14:02.040deep and durable and profound about the nature of your mind and your capacity for
00:14:07.040overcoming the unnecessary suffering of which you referenced at the beginning here.
00:14:11.400Yes. I mean, I think psychedelics are very interesting. I've explored this theme. I mean,
00:14:16.700if we look at, you know, you mentioned these two functions. Absolutely. I mean, if you,
00:14:20.780you know, one of the functions of psychedelics, MDMA, et cetera,
00:14:24.360is socially to remind us of what we have in common with other people. You know, when people say,
00:14:30.620I took this substance and I loved everybody. This is, of course, one of the feats of kind
00:14:36.020of spiritual development in all religions, that it is through kind of meditative activities and
00:14:42.380also ecstatic activities that you discover that the barriers between humans are, let's put it
00:14:48.460gently, exaggerated in normal life. In normal life, we focus on the differences, but how
00:14:54.280interesting and how nice life would be if we focused on the similarities. And we may need a
00:14:59.080substance and a setting in which that can more easily be accessible to us. And then, you know,
00:15:04.240you mentioned self-exploration. Well, exactly. I mean, the Freudians, bless them, and I'm very
00:15:09.420indebted to the Freudian tradition, they understand that one of the main obstacles to thinking about
00:15:14.620yourself is fear, that there are resistance based on a fear of all sorts of deeply uncomfortable
00:15:20.800things about oneself, like, you know, one's sexuality may be more complicated, one may have
00:15:25.660aggressive urges, where one's supposed to be merely, inverted commas, nice, etc. And that
00:15:30.360a substance like MDMA might lower the defenses, enabling one to achieve insight. And again,
00:15:39.300you know, what a serious mission for something which for too long languished in the lane called
00:15:45.160fun. Have psychedelics been part of your process? I mean, have you taken the various drugs?
00:15:52.560I don't know if I'm going to be arrested for saying so. I don't know. But yes, I have. I have
00:15:57.880taken MDMA and psilocybin in sort of clinical or pseudo-clinical settings. In other words, for
00:16:04.220these ends of self-exploration more than so-called fun. And they've been tremendously helpful in
00:16:10.240essentially, you know, my problem with drugs and alcohol was always that these things were
00:16:17.540not being used seriously. It's not the substance itself that I didn't have any problem with. And
00:16:21.800again, religions have been wonderful at reminding us. I mean, you know, what is Dionysus responsible
00:16:27.620for? He's responsible for the God of wine. He's a God of wine. And how interesting to put wine
00:16:32.760right at the center of, you know, ritual and psychological development. And we too often
00:16:39.300fail to do that. Yeah, well, the Greeks, as you know, had the Ellicinian mysteries for a couple
00:16:44.840of millennia. And, you know, those who partook came away saying that this was the foundational
00:16:52.040few days of their lives. And to some degree, at least if we don't blow it and recapitulate some
00:16:59.520of the errors of the 1960s here, what the current moment promises is a more sober, more methodical,
00:17:07.500more scientifically informed, but yet nonetheless profound kind of reintegration of that kind of
00:17:14.000ritual, you know, the pharmacological ritual in culture.
00:17:18.240I mean, you know, I'm thinking about why people are boring. All human beings have very complex
00:17:22.820lives, but we all know some people who, when you come into their vicinity, you yourself feel that
00:17:28.900you have an awful lot to say to them and around them. And there's a lot of feeling. And other
00:17:33.380people, we feel, you know, they are saying, what have you been up to lately? And the mind goes
00:17:37.680completely blank, largely because I tend to think that this is a function of how much they've
00:17:42.580explored of themselves. A so-called interesting person is generally somebody who's been very
00:17:47.840interested in themselves, not in a narrowly egocentric way, but they've opened a lot of
00:17:52.160doors. And I think one unconsciously senses that when you come into contact with them and then you
00:17:57.180have a lot to say. I would immediately put you in that category, Sam, which is why people enjoy
00:18:02.280talking to you. And I think that one of the things that psychedelics allow people to do is more
00:18:08.120easily explore bits of their minds, which when they are outside of the substance, continues and
00:18:14.360gives them a kind of space, which they allow to other people to, you know, explore their own
00:18:20.520minds. And so one ends up, you know, having a more interesting time and a more, if you use a
00:18:26.160hackneyed word, compassionate time, where there's a lot more on the table to discuss and to feel.
00:18:31.320Well, let's talk about the attenuation of the ego, because it strikes me that there's a normative, optimal, entirely desirable version of this. And it's one that I've thought a lot about and spoken a lot about. But there's also pathological counterfeits, I would say. And they relate to the discomfort we referenced a moment ago around ecstasy and secular culture and its political implications.
00:18:58.500I mean, when you're talking about, you know, the Dionysian attitude and what that looks like at the level of a crowd, I mean, it looks one way in a rave or, you know, other nightclub setting.
00:19:12.600It looks another way in a political context, you know, that, you know, one could argue that at a large political rally, you know, Nuremberg looking or otherwise, there is a kind of self-overcoming of the individual.
00:19:26.980There's this kind of fusion to some larger end that amounts to people kind of losing themselves in shoulder-to-shoulder contact with their brothers and sisters.
00:19:39.300And the pathology of all of that is all too obvious when you just read any bit of history.
00:19:46.900How should we think about the success and failure of what lies beyond the ego?