The religious impulse, which for some includes the capacity for ecstasy, can be at its best a cohesive force in society. In Darwin’s Cathedral, the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argues that religion confers an adaptive advantage on those groups who have it. He believes that the religious impulse is innate and that it makes cooperation, and therefore a common defense and survival, more likely. Faith, he states, “allows you to keep going in the absence of information.” Depending upon the reality of the circumstances, this is a good or a not-so-good thing. As the English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley wrote in 1886, the same words in both Hebrew and Greek “denote the ravings of insanity and the often equally unintelligible ravings of the diviner or revealer of divine things.”
The exuberant outpourings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century mystic and scientist, illustrated for Maudsley how religious enthusiasm is differently construed by believers and skeptics: “The visitation [of Swedenborg’s hallucinations] was the forerunner of an attack of acute mania, on recovery from which he was what he remained for the rest of his life—either, as his disciples think, a holy seer endowed with the faculty of conversing with spirits and angels in heaven and hell … or, as those who are not disciples think, an interesting and harmless monomaniac, who, among many foolish sayings, said many wise and good things, attesting the wreck of a mind of large original endowment, intellectual and moral.” (Perhaps weighting one side of the argument would be Swedenborg’s fervent belief that he could converse with the inhabitants of all the planets, except for those of Neptune and Uranus, which had not yet been discovered.) Indeed, mania and excited religious states have much in common—euphoria, a sense of intense well-being, and a heightened sensory awareness, among other things—and religion is the most common theme of both manic delusions and hallucinations.
For some, exuberance comes by way of madness or revelation. For others, it is sown into their dispositions as melody is in a songbird. Most, however, experience great enthusiasms only fitfully: when they fall in love, at times of personal triumph or national festivity, at a racetrack, in a bedroom, at war’s end, on a playing field, or with a newborn. These occasions are frequent and sustaining enough for most. But not for all. The history of our species shows that we have used every imaginable means to generate even more exuberance.
We are not the only species to seek high moods. Sloths intoxicate themselves by eating fermented flowers and chewing coca leaves, and elephants get high on fermented fruit and vines. Reindeer ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms, water buffaloes graze on opium poppies, and llamas and monkeys, like sloths, ingest the stimulant from coca leaves. Gorillas, wild boars, porcupines, and spider monkeys eat intoxicating or hallucinogenic insects, fungi, berries, and grains. Pleasure-seeking and a desire for novelty must be a part of the reason for this behavior, but the UCLA pharmacologist Ron Siegel suggests that self-medication is also involved. (Elephants, he believes, use alcohol not only as a source of calories and energy but also to relieve the stress produced by having poachers and tourists in their territory. It is not obvious how one could easily test this hypothesis, but it is an intriguing one.)
We, too, have a diverse hankering for intoxicants and hallucinogens. We, too, have been fond of the coca leaf and fermented grains, eaten seeds of the white-flowered morning glory, and enjoyed the magic of wild mushrooms. Many have smoked hashish or tobacco, and others have made ritual drinks of fermented honey and tree bark. A curious few have ingested hallucinogenic caterpillars. Ritual enemas, not to everyone’s taste, brought delight to the Aztecs and Mayans, who discovered that such nether-route intoxication was more rapid than drinking or smoking and the side effects were fewer. The Incas used enemas to experience the psychological effects of hallucinogenic seeds, and sixteenth-century Lowland Indians used them to take in tobacco.
There are many nonchemical routes to the high mental states, as well. The ethnobotanist Peter Furst chronicles a rather remarkable variety, including fasting, thirsting, self-mutilation, sleep deprivation (which can also trigger mania in susceptible individuals), exposure to the elements, exhaustive dance, bleeding, immersion in ice water, flagellation with thorns or animal teeth, hypnosis, meditation, rhythmic drumming and chanting, pungent or aromatic scents, and Indian sweat lodges.
The ingenuity of these nonpharmacologic methods notwithstanding, drugs dominate the history of our search for exuberant and ecstatic states. Even the oracle at Delphi who, it is said, spoke for the gods, appears to have owed her prophecies and trances more to earthly intoxicants than to divine inspiration. Indeed, reports the New York Times journalist William Broad, the ancient Greeks were the first to suspect that sweet-smelling gases rising up from the floor of the temple might set off the oracle’s frenzies. Before prophesying, the oracle breathed in “sacred fumes.” Scientists have recently discovered that the Delphi temple sits directly on top of a fault line through which ethylene, a euphoriant gas, escapes. The future had been seen through a vapor.
Drugs and gases can heighten energy and alertness or dull them; they can intoxicate, induce vivid living dreams, stir warlike rages, kill pain, or unite the disparate in a common cause. Drugs bring on exuberant and ecstatic states, as well. Alcohol, of course, which releases dopamine and serotonin in addition to the brain’s own naturally occurring opioids, has been used for thousands of years to exhilirate, to disinhibit, and then to numb. But many other substances have also been used.
In the late eighteenth century a truly remarkable gas was discovered by Joseph Priestley. It exuberated. Nitrous oxide, or “laughing gas,” gained wide popularity through the experiments of the great English chemist Sir Humphry Davy. Many of these experiments were conducted upon himself. The “pleasure-producing air,” he wrote, “absolutely intoxicated me … made me dance about the laboratory as a madman, and has kept my spirits in a glow ever since.” His friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, no stranger to the sweet effect of drugs, spoke of its “great extacy,” its “voluptuous sensation.” Coleridge’s fellow poet Robert Southey was even less restrained: “Such a gas has Davy discovered!” he said. “It made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger tip.… It makes one strong, and so happy! So gloriously happy!… Oh, excellent air-bag!… I am sure the air in heaven must be this wonder-working gas of delight!” Yet another admirer of nitrous oxide said that the sensations experienced under its influence were like the great choruses of The Messiah played on the “united power of 700 instruments.” Nitrous oxide was taken at dinner parties, and there were “laughing gas evenings” at London theaters. Predictably, P. T. Barnum put together exhibitions for the public and, just as predictably, the crowds flocked in. In the best tradition of science and pleasure-seeking, medical students at Yale administered it to their classmates.
Seeking new sensation was not the only way the “pleasure-producing air” was put to use. William James said that his own experience taking nitrous oxide brought about an intense metaphysical illumination. “Depth beyond depth of truth,” he wrote, “seems revealed to the inhaler.… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.” Things seemed more “utterly what they are, more ‘utterly utter’ than when we are sober.” One’s soul, he said, will “sweat with conviction,” and regions of the universe will open. No map would be provided.
Like the results of most drug-induced states, the philosophical insights gained under the influence of nitrous oxide and similar drugs were often more intense than lastingly profound. Sir James Crichton-Browne, in his 1895 Cavendish Lecture, remarked that the thoughts one had while inhaling nitrous oxide were in “nine cases out of ten connected with some great discovery, some supposed solution of a cosmic secret.” But such revelations, he wrote in the Lancet, usually prove illusory:
A medical man upon whom my former colleague, Dr. Mitchell, experimented with nitrous oxide gas imagined before becoming unconscious that he had made a most important discovery explaining the whole action of the gas
; and Dr. Mitchell himself had repeatedly the same experience, his mind being seized by expansive ideas which, while they lasted, made all dark things clear.… We might as well look for phosphorescence on the sea in the blaze of midday sunshine as hope to reproduce such dreamy mental states in the full light of objective consciousness. Nothing but a vague remembrance that they have flashed across the mind remains when waking life is resumed, and endeavors to recall them or grasp them in passing, when not fully futile, are apt to prove ludicrous in their results. I dare say many of us recollect the story of the professor who, having experienced a magnificent thought in the early stages of chloroform inhalation, resolved that he would by one bold sally lay hold of it and so read the riddle of the world. Having composed himself in his easy chair in his study, with writing materials at hand, he inhaled the chloroform, felt the great thought evolve in his mind, roused himself for an instant, seized the pen, wrote desperately he knew not what, for even as he did so he fell back unconscious. On coming to himself he turned eagerly to the paper, to find inscribed on it in sprawling but legible characters the secret of the universe in these words, “A strong smell of turpentine pervades the whole.”
Cocaine—known also as California cornflakes, happy trails, sleigh ride, and nose candy—is another euphoriant. Eaten, sniffed, injected, or inhaled, cocaine quickly causes euphoria by stimulating a part of the brain (the dopamine-containing projection from the ventral tegmental area to the nucleus accumbens) that regulates pleasure. The brain floods with dopamine. The enjoyable effects of cocaine—greater energy and heightened sensitivity of sight, touch, and sound; high mood; increased talkativeness—are not unlike those of the early, mild stages of mania, but they are less intense and of far shorter duration (lasting minutes or hours, not days or weeks). Like most mind-altering drugs, however, cocaine supplies a pleasure freighted with costs. The same neurons that are activated by dopamine and give delight eventually become desensitized to it. Depression and apathy follow. Prolonged cocaine use, which diminishes dopamine functioning, gives support to the general rule that external sources of exuberance are ultimately overruled by the brain’s inclination to seek out equilibrium.
Hashish likewise takes back the joy it first so enticingly gives, but the road to ruin is often a glorious one. “Hashish spreads out over the whole of life a sort of veneer of magic,” wrote Charles Baudelaire. “Scalloped landscapes; fleeting horizons … the universality of all existence, arrays itself before you in a new and hitherto unguessed-at glory.” Paradise and heaven, the life of a god itself, are at the user’s beckoning: “A wild and ardent shout breaks from his bosom with such force [that it] would bowl over the angels scattered on the paths of Heaven: I am a God!”
Théophile Gautier felt no less rapturous. The physician who gave him hashish told him, “This will be deducted from your share in Paradise,” and in Paradise—for a quick while—he was, filled with the “maddest gaiety.” “What bliss! I’m swimming in ecstasy! I’m in Paradise! I’m plunging into the depths of delight!” The human frame, he said prophetically, “could no longer have borne such intensities of happiness.” Indeed, neither his frame nor Baudelaire’s proved an exception to pharmacological law: what goes up must come down. It is a law ignored anew by each generation of pleasure seekers; some pay more for ignoring it, others less. Cocaine, hashish, opium, Ecstasy: all seduce with the promise of rapture or exuberance—and then they collect.
In group celebrations, we find exuberance differently. A love of festivities is universal, observed William James, and in many respects celebration is yet another form of human play. The same acts are experienced more intensely when performed in a crowd than when done alone. In a large and festive group, our actions build in response to those around us; they reverberate and gather energy. Celebrations are not as circumscribed as more ritualized and formal group gatherings; improvisation, playfulness, and exuberance hold sway. We celebrate the end of precarious times—war and winter, for example—and times of great accomplishment: Lindbergh’s landing in Paris, a footstep on the moon, or a political candidate’s success.
The intensity of exuberance varies of course, depending upon the size of the group and whether the celebration is of a private or a more public nature. Senator George McGovern, the Democratic nominee for president in 1972, contrasts the kind of exuberance he and his crew felt after surviving combat in World War II with the raucous celebration that he and everyone else in the convention hall shared the night he was nominated. As a bomber pilot, he says, he felt exuberant anytime he and his crew survived heavy antiaircraft fire and returned safely to their base. (This was especially true after he had had to land his four-engine B-24 bomber with only two engines operating and on a runway only half as long as needed for a safe landing, a feat for which he received the Distinguished Flying Cross.) A gentler exuberance accompanied his return home after his combat duty was over: “At the end of my 35 missions, flying high over the Atlantic with my crew asleep and [myself] at the controls, I looked at a full moon, lovely white clouds and the ocean below and the war over for me—a wonderful sense of peace, and satisfaction and exuberance came over me. We had done our job well, [although] our navigator had been killed in combat and one of our gunners had been wounded and stayed behind in an Italian hospital. The rest of us were well and healthy and were reflecting on soon seeing our families. It was a quiet exuberance that I’ll never forget.”
The exuberance McGovern experienced on his nomination in 1972 was very different: “It is difficult for me to imagine a feeling that could transcend the feelings of exuberance that swept my heart and mind and indeed my entire being upon being nominated as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States. I watched the nomination from my hotel in Miami, in a room with a few staffers. Eleanor [McGovern’s wife] was on the convention floor with other members of my family. Television captured the exuberance of the crowd for me and greatly added to my own. I believe the greatest feeling for me came the next night when early in the morning (2 a.m.) I went to the Convention for the first time to give my acceptance address. The tremendous applause, the shouts of sheer joy, the demonstrations, including dancing in the aisles, the hundreds of joyful embraces of the delegates—this was the highlight of exuberance for me.”
We celebrate national occasions of moment. John Adams, in a letter to his wife, Abigail, written on the third of July 1776, wrote: “I am apt to believe that [Independence Day] will be celebrated by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary festival.… It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations, from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Adams’s use of “solemnized” in the context of bells and bonfires is a telling one. The attachment of joy to the marking of profound events is signal: it ties pleasure to recollection and makes more likely the perpetuation of the occasion thought significant enough to be remembered. Towns are bound together by joy, the country united in common cause and recollection.
The American observance of independence from Britain continues more than 225 years after the fact, with defining elements taken from the earliest celebrations. Eighteenth-century Boston celebrated the nation’s independence with cannon fire and gun salutes from the ships in Boston Harbor. A sermon to the state assembly was followed by thirteen toasts, one for each of the new states, proposed by Governor John Hancock; the militia paraded and, at night, fireworks exploded over the city. A century later, the abolitionist and suffragist Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” described the Fourth of July celebrations held in her native New York: “The endless crackling of torpedoes, the explosion of firecrackers and the booming of cannon,” she wrote, “made the day one of joyous confusion.… It then seemed to be a day wholly devoted to boyish pleasure and mischief.” There was, she reported, “a perpetual popping and fizzing [and] shouts of merriment,” and, later that night “Roman candles, blue lights, and rockets.” On the Fourt
h of July in 2000, yet another century later, an estimated 5 million people crowded to watch 120 tall ships and forty warships parade past New York Harbor. There was a clear continuity with the first celebrations of the nation’s birth: great sailing ships and pealings of church bells, community parades during the day, and fireworks at night.
Fireworks have ignited festive moods for more than two thousand years. A primitive alliance between man and fire, between darkness and light, fireworks are the perfect display of human rejoicing: we send up rockets of light into the sky and they burst into blazing bits of dazzling beauty. Our moods ride with them. Fireworks create magic and bring together those watching them into an ebullient, alert, and awe-filled state; they inspire a shared sense of wonder, of beauty, of excitement. They splash the night world with sound and color. As Barnum knew, the world needs to celebrate; it needs someone to “throw up sky-rockets.” It is in our nature to rejoice in and with those who do.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Forces of Nature”
(photo credit 7.1)
The pursuit of knowledge is an intoxicant, a lure that scientists and explorers have known from ancient times; indeed, exhilaration in the pursuit of knowledge is part of what has kept our species so adaptive. Early humans survived and then flourished because some took keen notice of the habits of prey and predator while yet others explored to advantage their terrain and the land beyond. A few watched the night skies, traced the movement of the stars, named the constellations, and reckoned the progression of the moon, the sun, and the seasons.
What drew these observers and explorers to their watch and mullings? What pulled them to imagine and wonder about new worlds or new ways of understanding: to count, describe, make sense of, predict? Why did Hipparchus look upward and name the stars while tens of thousands of others slept? What compelled Archimedes to calculate the mathematical properties of spirals and spheres, or Gauss to approach infinity and presume to grapple with it? They had imaginative and audacious minds, certainly. But they also had passion and energy; they took joy in discovering something new. Nature rewards the enthusiastic and curious with excitement in the chase and the thrill of discovery, rewards the intellectually playful with the exuberant pleasures of play. Exuberance in science drives exploration and sustains the quest; it brings its own Champagne to the discovery.