Why we need more “spiritual geniuses,” according to public radio host Krista Tippett

Krista Tippett is the host of On Being, a Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast. It’s a unique show, focusing on hefty metaphysical themes like God and the meaning of life. But the conversations themselves are both nuanced and accessible.

Every week, Tippett engages a guest in an exploration some of humanity’s oldest philosophical questions: What does it mean to be human and how ought we to live? The guests are as varied as the answers to these questions — theologians, poets, scientists, writers, academics, artists. A graduate of Yale Divinity School and a former political journalist for the New York Times and Newsweek, Tippett brings a rich and interesting perspective to the show, one that informs but never overwhelms the conversation.

In this interview, I talk to Tippett about the show and how she thinks about the questions she puts to her guests. I ask her about the meaning of wisdom, the tension between religion and science, and why she believes the world needs more “spiritual geniuses.” We also talk about her new book, Becoming Wise, which is a collection of the insights she’s gleaned from her guests over the years.

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

You always start your interviews by asking guests what kind of religious or spiritual environment they grew up in — why?

That’s a great question. It is a question that people have a fascinating story and fascinating answer to wherever they are on the religious spectrum. But I think the deeper reason I ask it is it’s a great question for planting the conversation and planting them at the outset in a place in themselves that is soft and searching.

It’s a different place than the kind of propositional way that we tend to present ourselves, that we instinctively present ourselves in public where we start a conversation. So I do it because whatever happens, the answer to that question isn’t always in the edited show, but I find it determines the trajectory of everything that follows.

So many of your conversations orbit around a handful of metaphysical themes: truth, meaning, wisdom, beauty. Do you think these are the questions our culture has forgotten?

I think they are questions our culture doesn’t prioritize. I actually think that people, all kinds of people, are working with meaning, wisdom, and beauty, grappling with it and aspiring to it in their lives. But somehow this grappling is not above the radar. In fact, what’s above the radar is often the antithesis of wisdom and beauty.

You started your career as a reporter. I imagine this approach flows out of that experience.

That’s right. I attribute this in part to the philosophy and practice of journalism that we inherited from the 20th century. This idea that the news is the extraordinary thing that happened today, which is how journalists a few years ago, could have defined it for me. The way that’s been internalized is that the news is the extraordinarily terrible things that happen today. There’s a great tradition of delving deeply into what is terrible and interrogating it and taking it apart and analyzing it in great detail.

We don’t apply that that kind of sophistication or intelligence to the aspects of being that are redeeming. We don’t analyze the aspiration. When the people in Charleston proclaimed their love and forgiveness for the person who shot their loved ones, we don’t give them thousands of words about, “How did you become like this?” Even though when things like this happens, I think it does stop many of us in our tracks at least for a moment, and we also see this good way it’s possible for humans to be. I actually think it’s happening all around us but it’s not getting publicity, it’s not covered. It’s not considered to be newsworthy and serious.

Your book is about becoming wise. So let me ask the deceptively simple question: What is wisdom, and how is it different from intelligence?

You know I wrote that book and I realized at the very end that I never really defined wisdom. I think intelligence and knowledge are certainly not unrelated to wisdom. They coexist often in the same person. They’re accomplishments. We can point at a person and say they are intelligent or knowledgeable. I think the measure of wisdom is the imprint the person makes on the lives around them, the world around them.

So that we see and recognize wisdom not just based on what somebody knows, not just on what they accomplish, but in this combination of intellectual, moral, and physical presence that is transformative for others.

I also think there are these wise people who we can all list off from history who we’ve put up on pedestals. They’ve all had pretty messy lives: Gandhi, King, Mother Teresa. If you look at their lives, they were just people too. When you think of eternally wise people, it’s the quality of their presence, what happened to people in their presence, that stands out.

I’ve always been fascinated by the gap between knowing and doing. These are very different things, as you know. There’s a reason why ethics professors tend not to be more ethical than other people. On some level, being wise has more to do with how we behave and less to do with what we know.

Yes, wisdom is a matter of how you live and how you practice virtue, how you take advice and put it into action. No one will be perfect. It’s an intentionality and a willingness to keep trying, keep walking that line. What we’re learning from neuroscience is that you become what you practice.

As Aristotle said, character is destiny…

Absolutely.

Tell me about this concept of “spiritual genius,” about which you write in the book.

Spiritual genius is something Einstein spoke about, and I love this language. I believe spiritual genius is as necessary to humanity as objective knowledge. Intellectually, I’m kind of titillated by that. I feel like I’ve been in the presence of spiritual genius. When I decided to ask what is that, what creates that, I was really forced to get much closer to the ground.

The thing I do in my interviews is walk that line between what they know and who they are, which is really another way of talking about what you just said, about knowing and doing. How those things intersect and interact across a lifetime. We all walk back and forth on that line all the time.

A common theme on your show, and in this book, is the tension between religion and science. How do you understand this tension?

I think most of the tension as we know it in culture is fabricated. I don’t think it’s true to the history of religion and the history of science. On a very fundamental level, I would say that science and religion clash if you suppose that science and religion are reaching different competing answers to the same questions of life.

But I tend to think they are looking at the same aspects of life but asking different questions about those things. They’re different lines of inquiry. It has become a tension, and it’s not without tension, but it’s a creative tension.

You talk to a lot of scientists on your show. How do you find them grappling with this question about the compatibility of faith and science?

I just got off the phone this morning with Carlo Rovelli, this Italian physicist, who’s written this amazing book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. He’s an atheist like a lot of the scientists I interview. How he’s able to articulate life and what it means to be human through how he sees reality as a physicist is fascinating and enriching. It’s so much more interesting and additive even for religious people to hear than a debate about what Genesis said or if there’s a God, which is a question that neither side can definitively answer.

I’ve had a few scientists and skeptics tell me that you’re too soft on religion, too indulgent of unreason. How you respond to these criticisms?

I do want to be soft and indulgent. What is implied in that to me too is deeply curious about a force that is so powerful and motivating and decisive in so many lives. We don’t think often enough that hospitals and schools and music, so much of what enriches human lives, would be gone without the inspiration of religion.

So I don’t have any problem with the idea that I’m soft in this way. I don’t think that’s the same thing as not thinking clearly. My goal is that we are able to be in each other’s presence as people who think very differently and see the world very differently and to be really curious about that and to be open to and surprised by each other. The point of that is to really live together and bring the best of whatever we know and do to this common endeavor of common life.

I don’t think we will do that with religious people by asking them to put their deepest convictions to the side or putting them on the defensive. I think we have work to do. I think the people I speak with, the actual lived expression of their faith, whether you want to call their faith reasonable or unreasonable, are making the world a richer, more caring, more generative place.

There’s an interesting passage in your book about Einstein’s dismay as he watched the fruits of science get coopted by fascists and warmongers. “Science,” he said, had become “as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a child of three.”

What’s the lesson to be drawn here?

Well I think about that a lot. I think you can argue that there’s an analogy now with our technology, and it’s not merely weapons. We have given rise to these technologies that are immersive. Our children are growing up with their phones coming out of their fingertips. It’s a part of our bodies, our work, and our love lives. Behind that are these industries that are powerful as any industries that have ever existed in the history of our species.

So our technology is in its infancy and yet we are still failing to keep up with it. I think this is what Einstein was worried most about. I think he was concerned with the rigidity of our moral and political wisdom.

Speaking of politics, I was struck by a line in your book: “There are places in human experience that politics cannot analyze or address, and they hold more possibility for change than we can begin to imagine.”

Where are these “places” and what possibilities for change do they hold?

I wrote that while looking back at being in divided Berlin around the time the wall fell, a time where the structure wasn’t just political but geopolitical, and it changed in a revolutionary way in a handful of years that absolutely no one saw coming. The chancellor of West Germany was out of country the day the Berlin Wall came down. But we all knew things were changing.

I had seen that from being a very young person in that city. It was shifts in the way people were creating reality — and when they lost the fears about what would happen, that was when they changed the world. Right now, I actually think we are in a similar moment. Our politics is broken, and that’s true no matter what side you happen to be on.

In my mind, the challenge now is to reinvigorate civic and common life, to recreate it. We have to stitch it together again. We have to invent what common life is going to look like in a century. It’s in the context of what you and I have talked about. This technology has changed the idea of community and leadership and authority. It’s much different now than it was in 1957 or 1997 or 2007.

That’s a great adventure but it’s also perilous and existential. I’m not sure if this is going to happen through political system. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be exerting our influence on political systems, but in some ways this sends us back to ourselves, to our communities, to our families, to our neighborhoods. I see so many people doing that.

And that’s what we have to do in these difficult times: return to ourselves in order then to return to our communities and neighborhoods.