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My book Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life – Paperback (Oct 5, 2009) by Dacher Keltner has arrived.  I am eagerly embarking on its study about what’s best about humans.  My insanely abusive Borderline mother sure didn’t teach me anything about THAT!

Keltner resides in the camp of study about positive human emotions.  Interestingly, researchers could not really study what has always been termed ‘happiness’ equally with the survival emotions such as fear and rage until technology invented photographic equipment that operates as fast as our face moves when we express emotion.

The more survival-based emergency related emotions happen in bigger ways so that we can watch them happen more easily than we can (could) watch expressions related to happiness and well-being.  Just as we needed really FAST photography to accurately be able to watch the visual information transmitted and received between infants and mothers (that build our earliest fundamental brain regions), we also needed it to see what happens when we treat one another well and with kindness.

(For an example of how the extremely rapid fraction-of-a-millisecond mother-infant communication takes place please scroll down to page 22 in Dr. Allan N. Schore’s paper, EFFECTS OF A SECURE ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIP ON RIGHT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT, AFFECT REGULATION, AND INFANT MENTAL HEALTH)

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Humans are born with the capacity to experience emotion.  We simply live them without thinking about what they are, what they mean, or what they are named.  In safe and secure infant-childhood environments we are helped by our caregivers to gradually learn about our emotions as we learn about our self and others in the world.  Eventually we learn what emotions are named and about how to ever more effectively regulate them.

Because this ability to regulate and differentiate emotions happens within our earliest infant-child attachment relationship environment, the process is either assisted or interfered with by our caregivers.  In my own case, as I study Keltner’s book, I doubt I will be able to think about very many instances from my infant-childhood at all where I would have even been allowed to experience the positive emotional states.

I find it interesting that even in the field of vastly expensive scientific research that the differentiation of ‘happiness’ and the study of this state had to wait until technology caught up with our desire and need to better understand the happiness aspect of who we are.

Dr. Keltner is at the cutting-edge of this research.  His study happens because he can use the new lens of sophisticated super-stop action photography to see our human finely tuned happiness communications in the same way that evolution of the lens allowed us to see new aspects of our world through microscopes and telescopes.

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Keltner states about the study of happiness in the first chapter of his book:

“The canonical [orthodox] studies of human emotion, studies of the universality of facial expression, of how emotion is registered in the nervous system, how emotion shapes judgment and decision making, had never looked into these states.  The groundbreaking studies of emotion had only examined one state covered by the term “happiness.”  But research is often misled by “ordinary” language, the language we speak rather than the language of scientific theory.  Happiness is a diffuse term.  It masks important distinctions between emotions such as gratitude, awe, contentment, pride, love, compassion and desire – the focus of this book – as well as expressive behaviors such as teasing, touch, and laughter.  This narrow concentration on “happiness” has stunted our scientific understanding of the emotions that move people toward higher jen ratios.  By solely asking, “Am I happy?” we miss out on the many nuances of the meaningful life.

My hope is to shift what goes into the numerator of you jen ration, to bring into sharper focus the millisecond manifestations of human goodness.  I hope that you will see human behavior in a new light, the subtle cues of embarrassment, playful vocalizations, the visceral feelings of compassion, the sense of gratitude in another’s touch to your shoulder, that have been shaped by the seven million years of hominid evolution and that bring the good in others to completion.  In our pursuit of happiness we have lost sight of these essential emotions.  Our everyday conversations about happiness are filled withy references to sensory pleasure – delicious Australian wines, comfortable hotel beds, body tone produced by our exercise regimens.  What is missing is the language and practice of emotions like compassion, gratitude, amusement, and wonder.  My hope is to tilt your jen ratio to what the poet Percy Shelley describes as the great secret of morals:  “the identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.”  The key to this quest resides in the study of emotions long ignored by affective science.”  (pages 14-15)

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My mother was extremely short on jen, as are all people who outright neglect, abuse and maltreat people – infants and children most included.  My mother’s experiences in her own abusive childhood seemed to completely obliterate any ability she was born with to understand what ‘being good’ was all about.  Certainly it was my experience with her that she was never able to ‘be good’ to me and in fact she did not believe I even had the capacity to ‘be good’ myself.

In fact, my mother projected her own ‘badness’ that she found intolerable inside herself out onto me and proceeded to spend the 18 years of my childhood ‘punishing’ me for being ‘that bad’.  This process was, I believe, entirely connected to abuse in her own childhood as she had been told her ‘badness’ made her unlovable, but if she could only be ‘good enough’ she would be lovable and loved again.  Something became permanently broken in my mother’s early ‘good-bad’ early forming brain, and it made her into a monster.

Knowing this about my Borderline mother makes me very curious about Keltner’s book whose very title —  BORN TO BE GOOD — addresses the underlying conflicts my entire childhood was consumed with:  Evil versus Good versus Evil versus Good……..  Every interaction I had with my mother from the time I was born was in reality a communication from her to me about how essentially and fundamentally un-good and totally evil I was.

The extremes of my mother’s psychosis were so severe that she literally believed I was satan’s child and was not even born as a human being.  I was condemned beyond salvation, though my mother believed through every word and deed she abused me with that she was doing her very super-human best to save me as she battled to accomplish the impossible task of turning me into ‘something good’.

Keltner’s book is about the best in human social interactions.  I want to know more about this because I certainly have vast personal experience about what the worst in human social interactions can be like.  I want to improve my own ‘jen ratio’.  What might this mean?

By first translating the broad term ‘happiness’ into the broader term ‘goodness’, Keltner then describes the kinds of minute human interactions that both communicate goodness and build it into self and others.  The term “jen ratio” is the kingpin of his writing    About jen itself Keltner states:

“…Confucius taught a new way of finding the meaningful life through the cultivation of jen.  A person of jen, Confucius observes, “wishing to establish his own character, also establishes the character of others.”  A person of jen “brings the good things of others to completion and does not bring the bad things of others to completion.”  Jen is felt in that deeply satisfying moment when you bring out the goodness in others.

“Jen science is based on its own microscopic observations of things not closely examined before.  Most centrally, it is founded on the study of emotions such as compassion, gratitude, awe, embarrassment, and amusement, emotions that transpire between people, bringing the good in each other to completion.  Jen science has examined new human languages [My note:  New to scientific study, ancient to humans] under its microscope – movements of muscles in the face that signal devotion, patterns of touch that signal appreciation, playful tones of the voice that transforms conflicts.  It brings into focus new substances that we are made of, neurotransmitters as well as regions of our nervous system that promote trust, caring, devotion, forgiveness, and play.  It reveals a new way of thinking about the evolution of human goodness, which requires revision of longstanding assumptions that we are solely wired to maximize desire, to compete, and to be vigilant to what is bad.

“The jen ratio is a lens onto the balance of good and bad in your life.  In the denominator of the jen ratio place recent actions in which someone has brought the bad in others to completion….  Above this, in the numerator of the ratio, tally up the actions that bring the good in others to completion….  As the value of your jen ratio rises, so too does the humanity of your world.

“Think of the jen ratio as a lens through which you might take stock of your attempt at living a meaningful life.”  (pages 3-5)

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I haven’t seen these two words in Keltner’s book yet, hope and enthusiasm, but this is how I feel as I enter into this new journey.  For all my awarenesses about the differences between how my body-brain-mind-self was formed in comparison to others who benefited from having a safe and secure attachment foundation rather than one formed in, by and for trauma, I enthusiastically hope that by understanding how we ALL have a jen ration operating in our lives I can begin to make my own ration better.

I will keep you posted (literally!) about my experiences with the information contained within the pages of Keltner’s BORN TO BE GOOD book I was fortunate to discover!

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