A Bit of Optimism - Life Worth Living with Miroslav Volf

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

What does it mean for a life to go well? What matters most in our time on Earth? These are the most important questions of our lives and yet most of us have no clue how to answer them. Miroslav Volf is a theologian and professor who has been grappling with these ideas for decades. He is the founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture where he teaches a class called “Life Worth Living,” and recently wrote a book by the same name.It turns out, life worth living is life helping others. This is…A Bit of Optimism.  For more information on Miroslav and his work check out: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691260/life-worth-living-by-miroslav-volf-matthew-croasmun-and-ryan-mcannally-linz/https://faith.yale.edu/people/miroslav-volf 

If there's one thing I really enjoy, it's talking about why we do what we do, why our lives matter. That's why I wanted to talk to Miroslav Wolf. He teaches a class at Yale called Life Worth Living. living. And though he's written over 20 books, it's his most recent book, Life Worth Living, a guide to what matters most, that I wanted to talk to him about. The founding director of Yale's Center for Faith and Culture sat down with me to really get into the thick of what it means to live a life worth living. And the results are, well, worth it. This is a bit of optimism. You wrote a book, and it's the title that I find absolutely arresting, which is Life Worth Living. And the first question I have for you is, why did you call it life worth living and not a life worth living?

Was it just a design decision or was there actually something philosophical behind it? I'm so curious. That's a really great question. I think there's a kind of philosophical intuition behind it. If I understand correctly, English is not my first language, and the Croatian, which is my mother's tongue, does not have definite and indefinite articles. So I'm not the best person to comment on the grammatical and philosophical significance. So it's simply a translation issue. Almost.

But I think there's a kind of philosophical conviction behind. I think a life worth living would be too individualistically construed life, as if life can be worth living if it simply is your life that is worth living to you and it's only your kind of a life. Now, I believe that there is something like individuality and particular flavor that each of us brings to life. We are unique, each of us, and we live uniquely worthy lives when we live lives that are worthy to be lived. At the same time, I think that there is something common among human beings. And so, the longer version of that title is that we are, if I ask, what are we after? We are after a life that is worthy of our humanity. What does that mean? Worthy of our humanity? It sounds highfalutin.

of our humanity. What does that mean? Worthy of our humanity? It sounds highfalutin. I think that's worthy of us as human beings. And then we have to ask, who are we as human beings? But my point earlier was simply to say, it's not simply about you. It's not simply about me. It's about us. Something that we share, and each of us shares in that in our own particular kind of way that takes you then you're you're quite right that takes you that in the whole discussion of what does it mean to be a human being why are we there to take a playbook from you but put it at the level of our humanity our purpose uh human beings rather than yeah than our purpose in individual endeavors. And a lot of people know or are familiar with some of the terminology of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is the base level, Maslow says, the base level, the essential need that we all have is food and shelter. That comes first. And then the third level up is human relationships, connection.

And then the top level, the tip of the pyramid, is self-actualization. And I've always struggled this because I think Maslow made a mistake. And I think the mistake that Maslow made is that he ignored the paradox of being human, which is every moment of every day, we are both individuals and members of groups. We have to reconcile these things. Do I put myself first at the expense of the group? Or do I put the group first at the expense of myself? And the answer is yes, it's a paradox. And if you only consider a human being as an individual with no need for any protection or belonging, then Maslow nailed it. He's 100% right. Food and shelter absolutely come first, and the goal is self-actualization. But if you consider us as members of groups,

families, churches, teams, companies, whatever it is, then social connection has to go first, and shared actualization has to be the goal. Yeah, I agree with you. I disagree very much with Maslow in this regard. One of the big problems that we are experiencing is you end up making means to life a goal of life. And that inversion of means and ends is so prevalent. So, for instance, in order to satisfy basic needs, you need money. Money is exclusively and only a means. It's worth nothing in and of itself, right? It's worth only as giving you access to something else.

But we end up in a society which spends most of its time trying to figure out how to get this consummate means, which gets you that inversion of means and ends. My friend from Germany, German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, he illustrates this with the image of a painter. And the purpose of a painter normally should be to paint. But we're in a situation where we are painters who are looking at what kinds of studios other painters have, what kind of materials they have, and so forth, and we spend most of our time figuring out, finding the proper means, fussing about paint,

fussing about light, fussing about whatever it is that we are fussing about. And we never, in fact, get to paint because we are obsessed with means or our means have turned into ends of our lives. What a brilliant analogy. And how often we do that. We read books, watch talks, or study in business, for example, constantly. You know, it's such a common question we ask of successful people, which is what are your habits? What is your morning routine?

As if we copying their habits will somehow translate into equal success, however you want to define it. And it's the same as, you know, if I build the exact same studio as Picasso, then I too can be Picasso or worrying about what will others think of my studio versus what will others think of my paintings. I also love the semantic play of if you become obsessed with the means, then you'll miss out on the meaning. If I may be so bold, how old are you?

I'm 66. You're 66 years old and you write a book about a life of meaning, a life of purpose. Could you have written this book at 56 or 46 or 36? And why not 76? It's a very good question. You know, the genesis of this book is a course that I, together with a then doctoral student of mine, have started teaching at Yale for undergraduates. And basic intuition behind it was that we live in an environment of privatized idea of what the good life is. And because it is privatized, therefore, in public domains, in universities, for instance, we don't spend time, have no resources to know how to pursue that life together as an

educational community. The same is true in the broader culture. And yet this whole idea of the good is so central to our lives. And I was aware of it when I was 16. You know, my mother was aware of it intuitively when she was seven years old and started to teach that class to figure out how can we, in pluralistic environments, how can we pursue truth-seeking conversations about what kind of life is worthy of our humanity. What does it mean to lead a good life, to lead a flourishing life?

My doctoral student at that time was, I think, 27. He was immediately gripped by that question. As I mentioned earlier, that question was my question when I was 16. And that question has been a question of humanity throughout the centuries, for millennia, as a matter of fact. That was the most important question. Indeed, that was the most important question around which our great educational institutions, universities, were organized. Certainly was true with European universities. Certainly was true with American universities. And yet that question could not find the space at a university to be taken seriously with intellectual seriousness because we universities ended up being or are now primarily about instrumental rationality, instrumental reason.

How do I get from point A to point B? But what the point B should be, we leave to each individual to determine. I mean, as a theologian, I think you have more credibility to have this discussion. I'm glad you think that. I think for some reason, we think people whose currency is faith, maybe it's just an intuitive bias that somebody who spent a life devoted to something higher than anything else on this planet. There is a compass or a credibility that you have to talk about things that are amorphous, ethereal, difficult to understand, complex. And so I'm curious, how much does belief in the afterlife affect how we live our lives now, right? Because some people who believe in an afterlife believe that it's important to lead a good life now so that you'll go to heaven, so that the afterlife you'll be taken care of. So whereas some people who don't believe in an afterlife believe, no, no, you live a good life now because it's the only one you've got.

I think there may be a third option. My current life is not mere means to happy afterlife. My current life is life, and that life is of a peace with the life that comes after. I live that life in a responsible way. that comes after. I live that life in a responsible way. I live that life as a human being should, just because I have a life and I'm a human being. But it's not as if one is a means to another. In fact, I personally think that's a really wrong way to think about it. So this earthly existence ends up being only school for something that really matters rather than actually life that ought to be taken with full seriousness and lived in a beautiful

way. Look, I love philosophical conversations, and I could go down this path with you for a long time, much to the frustration of anyone who's listening. But I'm also interested in practical application. And I assume that any student who chooses to take your course, life worth living, they're taking your course because they've asked themselves this question. And they're coming for guidance. And I'm curious as to the behavioral changes that some of your students may make after the class? Last assignment in the course is for them to have their own little life manifesto to describe how they imagine their own life as being worthy of their humanity.

Five pages, no more than that. And that's after they have sketched the Yale's vision of the good life. What kind of bill of good is Yale trying to sell them? That's after they've taught them how to analyze their friends' implicit account of the life

that is worth living. Then they write their own. And from there, we would have had to follow them, right? And see what impact it has actually had on their lives. Self-reportedly, they're hugely happy that they've taken the course. Early on, when I started talking about this issue, I would have an audience, I would talk to the audience, and everybody would nod their heads and say,

yeah, yeah, that's really, really important. Tomorrow they go to work and that drop has evaporated from the hot stone of their actual life and they don't return to it. So often I find that people who have had kind of either a natural development, a break in life, or something has happened to dislodge the inertias that govern our life, then they return to that question and it shapes the way in which they change their trajectories. It's rather a cynical view, right? Which is we have to have something shake us, personal tragedy or some sort of disruption, September 11th, death in the family

to get ourselves back on the path. I was in New York on September 11th. And for many months after September 11th, New York was absolutely magical and crime disappeared. There was no crime. And people were nice to each other and held doors open for each other. It was utopia. It was what life should be like, where we just sort of cared about each other and worried about each other. And I remember lamenting. I remember being in the middle of it going, this won't last. I was speaking at the UN when the first plane hit the tower. Wow. And I was speaking on reconciliation, right, which was to disprove my point that I was making. There it is, this horrendous, horrendous event. And I remember as the people were streaming down

the streets going out because you couldn't leave the city through any mass means of transportation. You know, people who were there, many would pull out, have stands, have water for people who were just passing by. There was a sense of we're in some difficulty. We need to stand by each other. You mentioned it may be cynical. And there is a kind of something disappointing. But on the other hand, when I think about our lives, we are kind of material beings. We are beings of habits.

We are kind of herd animals, right? Or in the best case, we are grouped, a tribe, animals who are concerned with others outside the tribe as well. But nonetheless, we kind of have these patterns. And I think that those often come to the good, right? If I had to always think about what I should do, what would my life consist of? And actually, when I think about what kind of life would be truly great, and many traditions emphasize that,

Christian Augustine Confucius said basically roughly the same thing. The ideal case is that the good life, flourishing life, isn't that something that you experience as a command. It's something that has been incorporated into your very being. Augustine famously said, love and do whatever you want. If you truly love, you can do that. Or Confucius speaks of the stages in his life where he discovers the teaching and finally embraces it. And then when he's 70, now I can do whatever I want to do, and I'm going to be doing exactly, live according to the teaching. And so we need those kinds of habits. But on the adverse side, they sometimes prevent a change that is necessary.

I like this idea of habits or reminders, because these near-death experiences or these interruptions, as you call them, they are just that, they're reminders. Every time a family member or friend experiences loss, at some point, the conversation will always turn to, this is such a great reminder for the things that are important in our lives and how we get so stressed out at things that aren't important. We all know that these interruptions, these tragedies are important and they work and they matter, but they don't have to be tragic to be reminders. I like the word reminder better than interruption. If you're a person of faith, for example, if you attend a church service every week, regardless of what your faith is, it's a reminder.

Or if you hang a religious icon in your house, it's a reminder. I've chosen the color orange to be my reminder. Orange is the color of optimism. And you will generally find orange somewhere in my life, whether it's a knickknack on the side of my bed, or in this case, I'm wearing a watch with an orange strap. And that's not for fashion. It's a reminder that I've made a choice of the kind of life I want to live. And that brightness stands out. I can't miss it. In other words, it can never be habituated. I think one of the values of faith

is that it sits outside or alongside whatever else we're doing. And it serves as a reminder of how we should be doing those other things. I completely agree with you. But maybe it's useful to distinguish between being on a path. Reminders are very useful. You kind of have a directionality of life, very conscious directionality. And then reminders serve a very good purpose. But sometimes we need

a reorientation rather than just to continue on something that we have chosen. And we start a book with a chapter that is called This Book May Wreck Your Life. Yeah, I love that. And then three examples, right? The Buddha, Gautama Siddhartha, whose life was completely wrecked from perspective of his living a life as a prince and expecting to inherit the throne. The same is true of a very different example of a marginal person like Simon Peter, who became the first pope.

His life as a fisherman was ruined, but it was transformed. And so you can see that from the perspective of what came after, the life that I was living was wrecking my life. But from the perspective of the life that I now live in the case of Buddha, you have to experience a wreck of that life, right, in order to go to a better place. And that sometimes requires certain significant events in life, something that kind of jolts us out of the normalcy. Is this a journey we can go on alone, or is this a journey that requires us to ask for help? So we know of cases where people went that journey alone, and there are some of the great masters whom we admire.

But we also know that I certainly know that I'm not one of those. That I, on my own, would not quite be able to do that. So that a certain kind of community of friends, of those who are willing to be with you on that journey, even if they sometimes don't share the kind of journey that you're taking, but who want to take seriously that reorientation that has occurred in your life and make sure that you do what you deeply feel you want to pursue that's worthy of your humanity. I think that's really important. And in fact, in the book also, we mentioned that the best way to do this, to find the community of friends and who are not necessarily

friends in terms of sharing answers, but who are your friends in terms of sharing the question. So it's a community of friends of the question. And so together with them to pursue. The theme, I think in your work and my work, even though it's not necessarily explicit, though sometimes it is, is service. Yeah. There has to be an element of individual sacrifice for the good of another.

And sacrifice doesn't have to mean your life and it doesn't have to mean, you know, climbing to the top of the mountain and giving up all your worldly possessions. But it might be that you put your own selfish feelings aside to mean climbing to the top of the mountain and giving up all your worldly possessions. But it might be that you put your own selfish feelings aside of wanting to talk about how bad your day is to just sit and listen to somebody else's bad day. Or you just pause for that split second to let someone else go to join the line at Starbucks before you, which would mean you're going to get your coffee four minutes later because they're going to have to get theirs first.

And these little acts of service matter in the lives of other people, which necessarily means they matter in our lives too. Put it this way. When you rejoice, if I'm in the right state of mind, and if I see things as I ought to, this is now my personal conviction. If I see things as I ought to, that your state of joy enhances my state of joy. So that in a sense, you rightly speak about self-sacrifice because it sometimes feels and is kind of detracting something from my own comfort, my own advantage when I do something like that. But at the same time, it's a gift that I give myself of my own humanity, if you want to

put it this way, so that there is a kind of deeper joy and deeper enrichment that comes precisely through that sacrifice. And I think it's this that we need to rediscover. What is your favorite story? Real or theoretical, hypothetical, historical, current, I don't care. But what is your favorite story that captures the essence of what you're trying to impart? I've never been asked that question, so I can't give you a really considered answer. And I'm not sure I'll give you an answer that will encompass all the elements of what I think is a good life. But here's a story that I'm actually right now writing about it, and it's the story of my family. My father was on a death march, and there he met

another person also on that death march after Second World War. Death marches were attempts at that time of the communist regime to eliminate people by starving them and marching them from place to place, and when they couldn't go further, to kill them off. So the unit in which my father was had about 1,000 people. When they finished about one segment of that march, in a month and a half or two, there were 300 left. Wow.

700 were killed along the road, partly from hunger, partly from not being able to keep up, varieties of things. My father met there another fellow inmate, you might call them. And this person was one of those idiots, maybe in Dostoevsky's sense of the term, that was so possessed by a kind of certain equanimity and certain kind of a joy that irritated my father to no end, that made him curse God and the world even more because there's this person who could have a stance like this in the situation of dire need when their lives were depending on hanging on a thread.

So what you mean by is they're doing this death march and he's saying, what a lovely day for a war. Almost. That's how my father experienced it. In fact, this person was trying to tell him, talk to him about how God is love, right? And totally did not resonate. to him about how God is love, right? And totally did not resonate. They were then in a labor camp and the river, River Sava in Croatia was separating two sides of the same camp. And they were separated. And this person swam across the river, risking his life in order to talk to my dad about God being love. And what I think was behind that was that this whole hell in which we are right now

is not the last nor most significant thing we have to say about the world. There is a foundational goodness, even if we cannot see it right now, sort of as an act of faith. And after that act, my father, who was completely enraged by circumstances, suddenly he was at one point arrested in this and transformed. Almost in a moment, I started to sing a song about God's love and transformed his total life. He was a different human being. And I thought, what an incredible thing. completely impractical man who seemed to live outside of the reality, actually was living connected with the reality that was more fundamental than anything that was surrounding them. And he communicated that and basically rescued my father. Suddenly his whole world transformed. Nothing changed, but his world from inside toward outside has been transformed. To me, that's incredibly inspiring. My great aunt survived the Holocaust,

and she had her first child. She gave birth to her first child on the train to the concentration camp. She was actually born on the train. And her and her husband survived the camps. And she told me when I was quite young that you came out of the Holocaust one of two ways. You were either stronger or you were broken. That's it. And she said, I came out stronger. My husband came out broken. That's why we need each other.

This sort of reminds me of your father and the holy fool. I doubt he could have been that person without someone to sacrifice for like your father. If he was alone, I'm not sure he would have been able to do it. That there had to be an element of service. That if he was all by himself, madness probably would have ensued. But he had purpose because of your father, which allowed him to stay in that heightened state. And your father would not have become who he was without somebody there as well.

I think that's really, really beautiful, what you're describing. That's kind of mutual dependence, almost that generosity needed to have an object to be itself properly. All of my work is semi-autobiographical. Obviously, I'm writing about a point in my life. Somebody asked me, how long did it take you to start with why, my first book? And my answer was every day of my life up until that day. And I live my life differently after the book than I did before the book. How do you live your life differently after you write a book on life worth living, Boon, where you started? I think teaching the class and writing the book has been

a tremendous blessing and served as a focus, as a reminder. We break down, for instance, the vision of the good life into life being led well, I act well in the world, life going well, circumstances are appropriate, and life feeling as it should. for the class itself, as we were structuring how to explore it. These three components, they're each implicated in the other. But for me, they're always reminders. Think of how you act. Think of the emotional responses. Think of the circumstances.

And I think one of the things that has popped for me when it comes to circumstances, circumstances of a life that is truly worthy of our humanity aren't just my circumstances, individual circumstances. There are communal circumstances. In fact, they're planetary circumstances. And if anything, this book that is very personal about personal reorientation of the self, has for me become very ecological, planetary, where I realize that my own flourishing is bound up with flourishing of the entire humanity. And that has been a really very salutary reminder almost daily that we receive from others and from the world much more than we give each one of us. And that's been my journey.

I'm still living into that, what that means, so that we don't have a world either divided in individual units or in tribes, which tends to be now the case, but that we can live as individuals, as fake communities, but as citizens also of the world that is somehow our home. To take this full circle, what started off as something that was missed in translation from Croatian to English, where there's no indefinite articles, Croatian to English, where there's no indefinite articles. There is deep truth to pursue a life worth living completely misses the point. And the journey that we must pursue is to live life worth living. Ours and those around us and the entirety of our world included. Miroslav, thank you so much. I thoroughly enjoyed this. You know, it's wonderful. You've given me new perspective on a lot of things. I'm going to carry

your lessons with me. Thank you so, so much. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to learn more about the topic you just heard, please check out the Optimism Library at simonsenik.com, where you can get access to more than 35 on-demand classes about leadership, culture, purpose, and more. Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other.