Disruptive Wonder, and Addicted to Awe

So, as I've been thinking about what I'd like to research this semester in my literature of awe class, I've been drawn to a single idea as a representation of all of my recent thoughts. I use the word idea loosely, because really it's a sound and a reaction, but in any case, I think it nicely sums up a component of awe. Have you ever been somewhere pretty ordinary when you heard a shriek of excitement from some little boy or girl, and it was like the whole world just transformed around you? You're all looking at the child and smiling for about five second, and then you look up, and it's as if the walls have been imbued with new life, and the mask of dignified adult stoicism comes down long enough for you to remember that you were a kid once, too--that you would have shrieked with joy at the same sight.

I think that moment of disruption opens the door to awe. This is an idea that Kelly Bulkeley touches upon in The Wondering Brain, where he proposes that a primary means of creating wonder in our lives is in disrupting the our self narrative. He writes: "One of the ways we elicit wonder is by scrambling the self temporarily so the world can seep in." I'm a little bit wary of having the world seep into me, but I think the point is a good one; experiencing wonder is sometimes more an act of allowing it into our lives and letting it fill us.

I think a lot of times, there are shooting stars zooming over our heads, but for one reason or another, we never really look up, and it takes someone shouting, "Woah! Look at the sky!" for us to be pulled from the mundane into that realm of wonder that so often accompanies stargazing or children or pure kindness. The thing is, I think in some regard, we as a people have distanced ourselves from the things that in ages past really brought us to a state of awe. Whereas in past centuries, man has found that sense of wonder in things like nature or deity or family, the modern man has cloistered himself away in concrete jungles and has done his best to deconstruct antiquity's views on God and social relations. In short, I think the built-in sources of awe that kept past generations going are largely missing from modern culture, and we've had to compensate with other things.

Well, so maybe you agree, but maybe you're thinking that's not that big of a deal. If we'res getting awe from somewhere, then it shouldn't really be important where it's from, right? Well, the thing is, I don't think our brains are really wired to be able to handle the kind of awe that we're feeding them these days. We're using all kinds of intense, concentrated stimuli to try to make up for the awe deficiency that we're experiencing, and in the end, it just desensitizes us from healthy sources of wonder and makes us increasingly dependent on unhealthy sources. You look at Buzzfeed or Upworthy or any of those other viral mills, and their central purpose is to inspire awe. They are, in some sense, their own wunderkammer, but the problem is that they inflict (I use that word intentionally) moments of awe upon us time after time after time, playing on our curiosity to get us to look and more and more of the "mind-blowingly amazing things that you've never ever seen ever," and we buy into it. I know, because a couple of minutes ago, I went to look up something that I had seen on Buzzfeed earlier today and ended up reading an entire page before I had even thought about the fact that I had fallen into the trap. Even the name is kind of unsettling: Buzzfeed. It implies a hunger for that "buzzed" feeling that wonder or shock or awe or disgust can bring, and says, basically, feed that hunger.

The hunger itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Nicolas Humphrey, a English psychologist, proposes, in Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness, that awe is essentially an evolutionary adaptation and that it was favored in mankind because it gave him a sense of cosmic purpose--a sense that his life meant something in the grand scheme of the universe and that he, as an individual, was moving toward the fulfillment of some grand "self narrative." The notion that we would seek after awe, then, would be rooted not only in psychological well-being but in our genetic biology, as a legacy from our ancestors. The problem is, we're overstimulating our brains to the point that the old tricks don't work anymore. We see a beautiful painting, and we say, "deviantArt has better ones," or someone plays a moving concerto, and we say, "That was mediocre at best compared to the stuff I've seen on YouTube." I think we're subjecting ourselves to "awe overload" and thus numbing our capacity to experience more simple forms of wonder. We're seeking stronger and stronger stimuli--as would an addict--and thus become more and more incapable of sating that hunger.

 I don't think it's a coincidence that viral content is modeled after contagion. I think we're pretty sick, honestly, and we're only getting farther and further from the things that could cure us--less sensitive to their influence in our lives.

What are your thoughts, though? As a society, do we still seek out awe through more traditional conduits like religion and nature? To what extent are we really "addicted to awe"?