Supersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering and Success by David B. Feldman & Lee Daniel Kravetz

Author:David B. Feldman & Lee Daniel Kravetz
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

Some may question whether James Cameron should be considered a supersurvivor. After all, he wasn’t a totally innocent person, though he never claimed he was. He was flawed, and he played a role in wrongdoings that culminated in the death of a good man at the bloody hands of people James probably shouldn’t have considered “friends.” But nothing about supersurvival requires that a person’s past be morally spotless. Unlike with many survivors in this book, James’s trauma resulted from a chain of events set in motion partially by his own actions. But if it were necessary to be a saint to be a supersurvivor, virtually no one would have a chance. As we’ve seen time and time again, however, trauma can sometimes turn lives around. For James, that night in 1930 began a journey, one guided by his conviction that God had saved him.

Nobody will ever truly know, of course, if the hand of God was at work. Philosophers and theologians have debated the existence and nature of God for millennia. René Descartes and Thomas Aquinas thought they could prove that God existed; Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins were pretty sure they could disprove this—or at least cast considerable doubt on it. The debate rages on, with no end in sight.

Fortunately, it isn’t necessary to know whether the divine exists to investigate the effects of faith. In his perhaps most controversial work, The Future of an Illusion, infamous critic of religion Sigmund Freud writes about his approach to religious beliefs: “Of the reality of most of them we cannot judge; just as they cannot be proved, neither can they be refuted.” Yet Freud nonetheless studied closely what he believed were the ill effects of believing in a god.

But Freud’s methods were crude, consisting primarily of in-depth case studies, often of himself or his emotionally troubled patients. Though respected by some, his work is hardly considered conclusive by today’s scientific standards. Since 1927, when The Future of an Illusion was published, social scientists have birthed countless studies trying to answer the question “What good is faith?”

Many have famously shown benefits of aspects of faith. Most significant in its scope is the research, spearheaded by David Snowdon, that has come to be known as the Nun Study. As an epidemiologist and professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky, Snowdon was initially interested in what factors would increase or decrease the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. More than twenty-five years and fifty published research articles later, the study ended up being so much more. His research team followed about seven hundred American Catholic nuns of the School Sisters of Notre Dame as they aged. Examining them annually, the team collected information on cognitive and physical functioning, medical diseases, genetics, and nutrition. Detailed records kept by the sisters on virtually every stage of their lives also meant that researchers could determine earlier risk and protective factors with a great degree of accuracy.

The most trumpeted finding of the study was a simple one: happier nuns live longer.

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