Is the world we find ourselves in today—with all the strife and war and hatred and polarisation and commercialization and extortion and the rest—is this what it is to be human? Is this what humanity has brought to bear upon ourselves and the world?
Or is it, perhaps, that where we are now is an amalgamated expression of having lost our humanity somewhere along the way? And if this is the case—this we have lost our humanity somewhere along the way—then what might our humanity mean; how did we get so far away from it; and how might we return to a thriving existence?
It is these questions that are explored by our guest for this episode, Dr. Darcia Narvaez.
Darcia Narvaez is Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA). She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She studies moral development and human flourishing from an interdisciplinary perspective, integrating anthropology, neuroscience, clinical, developmental and educational sciences. She has published hundreds of papers and over 20 books. She serves as president of KindredWorld.org, blogs for Psychology Today (“Moral Landscapes”) and hosts the webpage EvolvedNest.org.
However, in this episode we focus in on the impact 10,000 years of unnested children is having on our psychology, our morality, and our civilization as a whole. We explore how early life nesting experiences lead to what Narvaez’s calls Cycled Of Cooperative Companionship, and how the undercare of being unnested leads to Cycles Of Competitive Detachment—the cycle most of us are locked into now, a cycle that is definably unhuman.
Furthermore, we explore what it means and what it takes to break that competitive detachment cycle and come back into healthy connection with ourselves, each other, and the natural world.
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Darcia Narvaez is Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA). She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She studies moral development and human flourishing from an interdisciplinary perspective, integrating anthropology, neuroscience, clinical, developmental and educational sciences. She has published hundreds of papers and over 20 books. She serves as president of KindredWorld.org, blogs for Psychology Today (“Moral Landscapes”) and hosts the webpage EvolvedNest.org.
