How to find wisdom and wholeness in a modern world (w/ Krista Tippett)
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You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy.

Today's guest, Krista Tippett, is someone whose work I have admired for years. She's able to talk about big, often unanswerable questions in a way that combines rigor, deep intelligence, and a respect for the unknown. And at this particular moment in time, a moment when I, and maybe you too, often struggle to find optimism and hope for the world, Krista is a big believer in the fundamental goodness of human beings. She's an incredibly special person, and I am so glad that we got a chance to talk.

Krista is always looking for ways to acknowledge and to spend time with the issues that we're all dealing with, but can struggle to put into words. One huge example is that instead of moving on, minimizing or dismissing it, Krista is grappling with what the legacy of the pandemic and the lockdowns mean for each of us personally. Here's a clip from her TED talk. Here is one way to begin to talk about what the pandemic, the post 2020 world began to set in motion.

All together, for a time, we felt for the ground beneath our feet. We remembered that the ground beneath our feet is never as solid as we believe it to be. We remembered that civilization revolves around something so tender as bodies breathing in proximity to other bodies.

we softened. Chasms became un-unseeable between the ways we've been living and our deepest longings for all of our children and the highest potentials for human flourishing. So how to step into what we have been given to see, how we have been given to learn and to grow?

We're going to be right back with more Krista, more learning and more growth in just a moment. But first, a quick ad break. Today, we're talking with Krista Tippett about finding meaning and hope in a challenging time. Hi, I'm Krista Tippett of OnBeing. I think it's interesting, given the subject matter of your TED Talk and, you know, also the whole course of your career, that you started your career in post-war divided Berlin. And

I want to talk about whether you feel like some of that very literal division resonates with, I think, the division that many of us are feeling in the world right now and with the ways in which you have tried to approach that over the course of your career. I mean, Divided Berlin was this kind of cosmic drama where literally one people and history and language and culture and city had just been split down the middle and

into these two completely different geopolitical, economic, social realities. And they weren't just different. They literally had missiles pointed at each other. Like, they were our missiles, but they were at war. They were in a Cold War. Conflict in that place was not actually generated by people. It was generated by governments, which is quite different from the way...

We are so divided internally. And of course, none of these social platforms, the human beings didn't have this place to be expressing themselves for better or worse all the time. Difference and the conflict doesn't feel as resonant for me. But what does feel resonant for me is how...

We are again, like I have never in my lifetime since had a feeling of the world so ruptured, right? So existentially on edge and in fact, facing existential challenges. What stays with me from that time in Berlin that I really hang on to is

is knowing that I spent those last years before the wall came down in divided Berlin as a journalist and then with the State Department. And what I know is that the world was just about to change seismically and not a single person who was close, who was at that epicenter, none of our imaginations reached far enough for what was about to happen.

And that feels really familiar now. And also it is a source of hope, honestly. I learned that there's always much that we simply are not looking for and therefore can't see. And that cosmic surprises are possible. And so it's a lot of my wondering now and a lot of what I'm looking for is like, you know, what are those possibilities beyond the limits of what we understand now? And how might those be part of

the future that we want to move into. There's this quote that you used in your TED Talk that I've been thinking about a lot, which is, don't reach for the answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them.

I think that idea of what you're just speaking about, right, the idea that you were in this moment where things are about to change in an enormous way and in a positive way but couldn't really be seen in the moment, that feels such a direct parallel to that too. We're so geared up to look for answers and it's completely understandable and reasonable.

But it actually shuts down possibilities in ways that it's hard for us to take in. So this is where I kind of, I'm really interested to talk to you about these almost like meta questions, because I think that's what's really...

been striking me about the message you had in your TED Talk and also just my day-to-day life right now is the idea that living in questions and also trying to embrace a generative, a more positive, optimistic story of the world, that those are not naive, head-in-the-sand approaches to the world. Yeah, absolutely. And living with questions in an active, conscious, robust way is

It's not refusing to be proactive, right? Like it is a strong and intentional response and way to work with very complex reality. Can you talk about like the practical way of doing that, right? Because that's the thing that I'm struggling with. And I imagine many people listening are, is it's not that I disagree, not at all, but

At a time when, you know, as you put it, the story of rupture is such a dominant story in the news and in the world. And when you look around, if you try and be, and I'm putting this in quotes because I think that there's a skepticism to being, quote unquote, uninformed. That being informed is being informed about the bad and the terrible and the suffering. There's a simple practice that comes with it, but we're just inclined to be looking out for what's going wrong and what might hurt us and what might be dangerous. And we're riveted by what is, what feels threatening. Yeah.

And what is dramatic? And what is failing? We're riveted by that. So the practice is a practice of engaging your higher cognitive faculties, which are available to us, but they're not as automatic. They're not as automatic. And this other thing is happening below the level of consciousness all the time, nanosecond to nanosecond. And the practice is to actively look for people and places and things that

that are demonstrating the best of what we're capable of, that are life-giving, that are gentle and kind and creative, right? Generatively creative. So noticing those things, taking them in and cognitively deciding that they are as real and as important as the other things that are also real and important that are going wrong, actively inviting that to factor in, to infuse, right?

you know, your sense of the whole. Because the other thing that we do when we're, because we privilege those, those catastrophic images is that we then just assent to a worldview that says this is the bottom line. And then that means that anything that's good or good people, courageous people, they're

You know, I don't like the language of heroes, which is what we do, because then it's like, oh, that's special. You know, there's this word in psychology, what is it? Positive deviance. This just says everything about us culturally. That when people are behaving in ways that are true to their highest humanity, we literally scientifically call them positively deviant. And that's not true, you know, in your real life. Not in what you read in the newspaper or on Twitter, but like in your real life.

Most of the people you know, most of the strangers you come across in completely ordinary interactions in your daily life, they are trying their hardest, right? Like they're doing their best.

And they may be people you disagree with, but as a human, interacting, raising children, doing their work, there's so much goodness and there's so much beauty. There's just a lot of quiet beauty, right? That is actually the reality. That is actually the bottom line. But it's really hard for us to internalize that. I think there's so much of a, it's almost a cliche, especially amongst people at my age, right, to be like,

I'm just trying to take a break from social media. I'm just going to tune out of that for a little bit. And I think that what people find is when they do focus on the immediate surroundings around them, they find that it's a lot more positive. But the flip side, I think...

there's been this really welcome awareness of structural issues and of these bigger forces that underpin a lot of the suffering in the world. I sometimes worry that by turning away from the bigger things, these negative pieces or these big structural issues or a war that's happening thousands of miles away, I wonder if I'm losing part of my humanity, if I'm like numbing myself

Which I don't know. I really don't know if that's the case. This discipline of living the questions and seeing the generative narrative doesn't imply turning away, right? It implies kind of seeing it all. Yeah, tell me more about that. I want to hear about that. It just implies that you look at the most terrible thing that's happening in the world right now, and actually you have such an array of choices, right? I mean, there's so much to despair about, right?

There's something that we need to grapple with that has to do with the fact that technology and media as we have it can bring us immediate, vivid pictures of faraway suffering that we can actually do nothing to affect. And yet we are deeply affected, right? In human ways, we are filled with reasonable despair, right?

And I think we're going to have to learn how to work with that, like how to live with that. And it's not in me to say, as my daughter, who's 30, says, I just, I'm not going to read newspapers because all the, you know, they're giving me the worst picture. And they just, they demoralize and depress and they lead me to despair. And I choose not to live in despair. Like that's one way to handle that.

I don't think the answer is to turn away, but I think we need to get really conscious about this particular dilemma. And I think the question to live comes in where we kind of remind ourselves that there is this and I care. And there are going to be faraway conflicts for any of us that feel much closer to home than others. And that's true. And we just hold that and we can choose not to turn away.

and to feel compassion and to feel pain. But then the question to live, I think, and this is to your point about, you know, also large structural change. I mean, for example, I think that a question to live for a white person in this country at this time could be to really hang on to the question of

knowing that there are structural advantages and systemic privileges, right, that I have inherited just by virtue of the body I was born into, the time and place I was born into. And I think that culturally what we get invited to do is posture about that, like have an opinion, position ourselves on the right side of it, whoever we are, whatever that right side feels like.

make some gestures, which honestly don't go very far beyond gesturing. Like we can make really strong statements and we can make powerful gestures. I don't think that actually takes us very far at all in reckoning. I think, you know, what if every white person in this country, you know, lived the question every day, let this question be shaping what they were looking at, what they were

Noticing what they look, noticing what they pay attention to, noticing what they turn away from. How is this legacy, this systemic, this system I've been born into, how is this influencing me? Like, how is this in me in ways that I haven't been attentive to? This holding the questions, living the questions is a way to get more conscious and intentional.

And to ask different questions of yourself, like to challenge yourself differently. I completely agree. And I mean, you know, you talk about moving into wholeness, both as individuals and as a society away from, you said, away from death dealing and into life giving. And I think that we do live in a time and in a culture and with technological tools that really privilege statements over questions. But when you think about it, right, like being open to

Other people filling in pieces that you don't know. So many destructive moments happen from people coming up with a solution that they think is right for other people rather than listening to the other person.

One of the biggest lessons I've had to learn in my own marriage is I'm upset and I'm about to say it. We're going to have some conversation. And the worst conversations are when I have scripted both sides of the conversation where I'm like, I say this and then you say that. And then I say this and I smash that. Oh, I got your point. Totally. You said that. And it's like she hasn't even said any of those things. How can you possibly win an argument that hasn't even happened?

Like, why not go in with a question or a curiosity or like open up to what you're feeling, but then leave space for to be surprised. And every time I am surprised, I'm shocked by how often we go into this conversation. I go, oh, that's what you were doing. I wow. I was completely telling myself a different story. So I think that living in the questions applies at all levels of society. Well, you know what I love about that story, too?

So the thing is, if you look at reality, the reality close to you that you know well, that you have, that is the only, the people who you truly interact with, you know, there's so much we don't even get about ourselves, much less the people we're closest to. But the best chance we have are the people we interact with a lot of the time. And so here's the other thing. I think that we have this bias that, you know, at least what is evil and dramatic is bad.

It's thrilling, right? It's interesting. And then again, I think there's the thing about the hero stuff, putting people up on pedestals because they're good. It's very alienating. It's very dehumanizing. It's like, well, I'm so glad that kind of person exists. I could never be like that. And there's almost like a boredom factor in it, right? But the truth is, the truth is close to life.

First of all, we are very strange. Like, human beings are strange. And the closer you are to yourself and other people, you know this, right? Like, it's a very weird—reality is very weird. People are weird. And also, goodness is just as dramatic and complicated and really actually as tortured as, you know, its opposite. So all these things that we think about, you know, we walk through our society thinking

and making moral judgments, which, you know, I'm not saying that there's a place for that, and there's right and wrong. But, you know, we have these ideas about how we should think about other people who have certain kinds of beliefs or do certain kinds of things. And basically what we choose to do is not interact with them, and that's part of our way of making our moral statements or, like, you know, being our best self. But...

The notion of love being a public good sounds like such a fairy tale, right? Unless you actually interrogate how love functions in real life, which is what you said. It's like, you know, even the most intimate love in our life is rarely about feeling understood or understood.

perfectly understanding. It's very often, it's sometimes about how we feel, but like, you know, even with our children, it's often about the things we do, even though we don't feel like it today because we're in this relationship. Even when we are, there's a point of real disagreement or tension between

What we learn to do is not blurt out the first thing that comes to mind, which is what we do in public all the time. And, you know, because we're balancing what we have to say, even if it's a true grievance, with this intelligence about how can it be heard and how can we stay in relationship even if I say this.

So I guess I'm just saying, like, to get more reality-based in this way I'm talking about is actually more—it's more pragmatic, which is kind of the opposite of what I think—

the biases, if you just talk about this stuff in the abstract. I love that. I believe that 100%. And it's a way of approaching the world and natural to me. And I don't think it's always affirmed by culture and society. In fact, it's often actively discouraged. And so it's great to hear you make such a compelling case for it, because it makes me feel like less of a sucker, honestly. You know, I think sometimes I go around being like, but I

think people are good and people are like oh boy wait till you grow up but I'm like well I hope I don't grow up you know that's that's kind of the feeling I have is that there's like if this is being naive maybe I don't want to be less naive if that means seeing the world as a series of scams and traps and violent acts that are you know I'm

What's ironic about that dialogue that you talked about is this literally is the most primitive part of the brain that sees the world that way. But it translates into our most sophisticated disciplines. Journalism is all about investigating what's going wrong. And medicine, right? I mean, medicine until very recently. There's absolutely no attention. It's all pathology. Like we're only now, it's this major breakthrough that medicine could be about medicine.

creating health. It's incredible. Those are higher cognitive functions like that. That is an advance in consciousness. We're going to have a quick break right now from advancing our consciousness so that we can play a few podcast ads. We'll be right back.

And we are back with Krista Tippett. Here's another clip from her TED Talk. Across my life of conversation, I have learned that wisdom and wholeness emerge in moments precisely like ours, though ours is writ large, where human beings have to hold seemingly opposing realities in a creative tension and interplay. Power and frailty.

birth and death, pain and hope, mystery and conviction, brokenness and beauty, calm and fierceness, mine and yours.

I think that for many people, their association with you and with your work and why they have such a strong attachment to you is because you've managed to bring these questions of spirituality and religion and these questions about meaning and connection and suffering and purpose into secular places. Where do you see that being most needed? And also, where do you see that being the hardest to get people to actually engage with?

You mean just acknowledging this spiritual aspect? Absolutely. The question of meaning of life, not just like quantity of life or even quality of life. 20 years ago when I entered public radio, I took 10 years of hazing. Because, you know, I was close to a newsroom and that was just so suspect. And I always understood it to be a really great creative challenge. And I said in the beginning a lot to people who were skeptical that you could –

talk about these things in a way that had intellectual content that wasn't exclusionary or inflammatory or proselytizing, right? And I understood that those are the associations we have. You know, I was pretty sure that it could be done, but I just said, like, maybe it won't work, but it's too important not to try because this is a really important part of a human being and it's an important part of the human enterprise. So...

I've always been really intentional, and it has to do with taking care with words and creating an ethos that disarms those expectations. And I think, interestingly, in these 20 years, the American culture has become more and more secular. And that does not correlate with the spiritual aspect of life waning, right? And in fact, something I observe is

about younger generations. You know, we now have this in this country, and I guess in Northern Europe, you have this phenomenon that is completely new in the whole history of our species of human beings for the first time growing up without any kind of religious, ritualistic, religious identity and formation, right? I mean, in most cultures,

From the beginning of human history, religious identity was something that was inherited just like your skin color, right, and your hometown. And in this very short period of time, that's fallen away. I mean, you know, I grew up in the middle of America, Bible Belt. This was so, it was just so defining and unquestioned. And of course, the experiences people had and what the quality of that formation could be

Could be pleasant. It could be positive. It could be catastrophic. It could be, you know, boring and lazy and, you know, everything, the whole spectrum. So one of the things I'm observing now about when you suddenly have this generation of people who are getting no formation at all.

is I actually think that they have a more kind of fresh, pure curiosity about this. Like, what they don't have, what their parents had is baggage. And a lot of their parents said, I'm not going to pass that on to my kids. But the kids, as adults...

also not rejecting anything. And so when this part of you rises up, this place in us that has questions of meaning and what is it all for and what is a worthy life? And it happens for a lot of people when they have children, too, because you start asking, like, what is my obligation to form this young human being morally? And then you have to ask what you think. And I think also what this part of life carries forward is

Ritual, which we have an animal need for, you know, and we live in such a ritual poor society, but there are points in our life where each of us know our need of these things. A certain kind of community and text and tradition and, I don't know, what I would call like spiritual mentoring across time, which is what's happening in part in sacred text and in sacred tradition.

So I find that in some places this stuff is being reached for anew and rediscovered and in some places remade. You know, there was a guy named Yaroslav Pelikan who was this great, like monumental Christian historian,

of the 20th century at Yale. And he said to me, like, if you get rid of tradition, the only alternative to tradition is bad tradition. Like, when you make this up, you don't make out something better. And so there's, you know, there's a lot of that. But there's a lot of energy that I see. And then the final thing I'll say is since the pandemic, I am having the experience all over the place, including at

dinner parties in New York City, where five years ago, and certainly 10 years ago, the word spiritual would have been anathema, or even talking around what we're talking about when we're talking about spiritual. We were cracked wide open in ways that we've scarcely begun to metabolize. And the pandemic brought us up against all of these things that

You can call them spiritual or not, but they are, they're included, right? Our sense of our own fragility and mortality, it is, you know, it disrupted the natural embodied connection we have to other human beings. It made us all think, you know, we had to culturally, and this is amazing, as a collective, as a nation, as a world, ask the question, what is essential and what is non-essential? Right.

That's a practical question, but it's also a spiritual question. And actually, most of the answers that came back had to do with the giving of care. So I feel like this whole space has opened wide. And I'm just really curious to see how this is going to unfold over the next five years. Yeah, I really did want to talk to you about the ways in which the pandemic changed your thinking and changed the way that we experience the world, because I feel like

For me, one of the most profound effects of it was that it put these questions that I think had before been like philosophical or heady or kind of, you know, late night dorm room conversations about like, what is the meaning of life and the value of life and whose life is most valuable and what value does connection have in our life? All of those questions became

practical questions that needed to be answered in very, sometimes extremely scary and serious ways. And I think that it also really raised more than anything is what do we owe to each other? What do we owe to our neighbors? What's our duty to take care of the people around us? It's interesting to me to see the ways in which

We have continued to engage with those questions. And in a lot of ways, the ways in which we've decided that we do not want to talk about or think about those questions at all. The cultural inertia towards forgetting, towards denying that it happened, towards not engaging with those years is so strong. You know, it's again, it's our brains. It's like how we normalize. We normalize everything. I'm also watching it with climate. Yeah.

You know, I think a lot about weather, okay? Like, just a couple of, just a generation ago, you know, when I was growing up, weather was small talk, right? Small talk. And at a more significant level. And that was also a reflection of this more significant fact that it was like, there was this predictable rhythm to our lives in these seasons, right?

I talked a year or two ago with this wonderful ecological activist, Akulet Pishon-Badom, in the Gulf, who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina. And, you know, she talked to me about how another feature of, you know, what we're losing, what we've lost, was that, you know, wherever you grow up,

there are the storms that go with the place, the part of the world you grew up in, right? And so like, you know, people who don't live in California, you know, can't imagine how you could live with, you know, live with on the San Andreas Fault. But of course, you don't think about that. Or like I grew up in Oklahoma where you had tornadoes. But the thing is, we do live with the storms of the places we come from. We actually know how to stay safe.

We've lost that too, right? Or fires in California. These aren't the fires we knew. The tornadoes aren't the tornadoes I knew. You know, what happened, Hurricane Katrina was not the hurricanes that came before it. And this is monumental, right? Like this is the ground beneath our feet and the air we breathe, but we're normalizing it. We're just like, I noticed like people talk about fire season, just now factoring in that that is wildly destructive. Yeah.

And it's a way we keep ourselves sane. But I also think that this collective trauma of the pandemic has called us, you know, in a human life, you have these rupture points. And I don't know why we're like this. It's one of the strange things about us that we get these great chances to learn and grow when things go terribly wrong, right? Why? I don't know. Does it have to be that way? But it is.

The illness, the breakdown, the loss of a relationship, you know, those are strangely moments when sometimes when we can really have catharsis. And I think that this pandemic is like a collective example of that.

It laid everything out for us of this century that we have to deal with at a species level. So, I mean, one of the things I do is wherever I go, I bring the pandemic into the room. I notice that the more months pass, I will be at events for days and no one mentions the fact that we just went through this thing that is still all the way through our bodies. We haven't even begun to metabolize this. It's like people let that in.

And then it just creates this crack where maybe we do a little bit more of this work. It goes back to what we've been talking about in so many ways, too, which is that, you know, spirituality and religion and these questions, they create space for mourning and for grief and for...

dealing with suffering in a way that is really different than many of the ways in which we deal with those things in the secular world. Spirituality and science are not opposed, that they are complementary, that they're addressing different things, right? It's like, one thing, this is kind of related in the sense that I just wanted to share, you know, I grew up in New York City and I grew up in a household which I didn't think of as kind of unique at the time, but I realize now is.

where my mom is a practicing Jew and my dad is a practicing Christian. And they...

Both believe different things, but yet I think the biggest, most important lesson that I learned from them is that you don't have to agree with someone on everything to love them and to respect what they believe. The very unique nature of where I grew up, my parents literally went to services in the same building. My mom's synagogue was physically my dad's church. It was just she went on Saturday and he went on Sunday. That is so funny. Which is incredible, but there's something important about what they're both finding.

The thing that strikes me as really important is that you can grapple with these questions about like, why do we suffer? Why are things hard? What is the meaning of it? And I just feel like I don't really see those answers coming in a lot of, I feel like a lot of my friends who don't have any sort of religious or spiritual tradition struggle with those questions and don't feel like they have any place to find guidance on. That's the downside of, you know, just religious formation is

or places of ritual being part of our life together, even if there were profound flaws.

And also, I think those institutions, as they came out of the 20th century, like most of the institutions we have, have to be totally reimagined for the way we live now. It's just a form issue. There are deeper issues. But the other thing I'll add to that that I've thought a lot about lately is just, I mean, we have language of grief everywhere.

But I think, you know, the language of mourning and lamentation, right, like rituals of lamentation, there's a heft to that. And there are actually practices that go with it that are not there for people, that are not being passed on or not being shared. You know, for me, words, you know, the ancient rabbi said words make worlds, right? And I believe that.

Words are important. They have heft. They have power. And so there's just a whole vocabulary that is held within theology and within religious tradition that we actually need. And I'm feeling strangely, you know, more than 20 years ago, I think there's this whole array of theological words that feel more relevant to our just general life together.

than I feel like they ever have in my lifetime. And it is a word like lamentation or a word like repentance or redemption. And the practices go along with that language. Like the way those words and the fullness of their meaning ask us to reorient to the world, we need that. I don't know what's going to happen with religion as we've known it. There's nothing in me that thinks we're ever going to go back to this world I grew up in where

Everybody's going to some religious, almost everybody's going to some religious institution on the weekend, right? That's not the world we're going to live in. But like that there's a place for actual theology in this secular world we've entered because we need repentance, redemption, confession, and these very nerdy, you know, theological truths. ♪

Well, Krista, it has been such an absolute pleasure talking to you. Really, I can't tell you what an honor it was. Thank you so much for making the time to be on the show. Oh, it's been so fun. Thank you. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Krista Tippett. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com.

How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by Daniela Balarezo, Banban Chang, Chloe Shasha Brooks, and Joseph DeBrine, who are all very comfortable living with the questions. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who both appreciate leaps of faith but also appreciate footnotes and citations. On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team of genuinely good people who restore my faith in humanity. No joke there, just a sincere, earnest statement.

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