The Mysterious Smile

What My Seven-Week-Old Grandson Taught Me About Being Human

This morning, I witnessed what looked like a nearly full-blown smile stretching across the face of our seven-week-old grandson. His mother was holding him in her arms, and their eyes locked in a magical moment of connection, some deep, wordless embrace between mother and son. I found myself asking: Why do babies start to smile like that? And for that matter, why does anyone smile, at any age?

John Locke, the 17th-century English philosopher, Enlightenment thinker, and theological dissenter, promoted one of the most influential ideas in the West about the nature of human beings. He argued the human mind is a “blank slate,” that all knowledge, morality, and behavior arise exclusively from experience and sense perception. According to Locke, we are not born with innate tendencies such as love, morality, imagination, or any inclination to believe in a “higher power.”

But experiencing my grandson’s smile makes it hard for me to swallow this explanation whole.

To stay true to his claim, Locke would likely deem my grandson’s smile a learned behavior, mimicked through repeated interactions with smiling caregivers. And yet, I could not help but see the smile on my grandson’s face as an indication of something more, something mysterious, something pointing beyond the idea that we are born empty and shaped entirely by our interactions with the outside world.

In 1964, psychologist D.G. Freedman conducted a groundbreaking study in which he observed that blind infants smiled and laughed just like infants with normal sight, despite never having seen a face or learned to mirror joy. Decades later, Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist and former philosopher, affirmed in her book The Philosophical Baby (2009) that babies come not as blank slates, but as minds already alive with moral intuition, wonder, and the seeds for connective relationships.

In contrast to Locke’s claim that all comes from experience, these findings sing another tune: we do not arrive empty, totally dependent on the outside world to mold us into this or that kind of individual. Rather, we enter this world hardwired with curiosity, moral intuition, and a capacity to infer meaning and intention from the environment.

And yet, Locke’s ideas are still quietly alive in the assumptions of many of our institutions. Public education, secular higher education, various therapy modalities, and even some spiritual coaching programs often assume we are formed from scratch by our environments and the personal choices we make. The prevailing narrative says that the everyday phenomena we observe are explainable solely through the natural sciences of chemistry, biology, and physics. Any suggestion of agency beyond what these sciences can measure is often dismissed as irrational or even naïve.

Developmental psychology has learned that infants typically don’t experience self-reflective awareness until around 18 to 24 months of age. My grandson, at seven weeks old, is not self-aware in that technical sense. But he’s smiling at me. And I’m staring back, wondering what knows how to smile in him before he knows who he is. Maybe the smile is coming from a pre-self—a kind of presence, a relational field, deeply aware without yet being self-reflective.

What else might we be missing when we take a purely natural science orientation to explain all of life, all of being, in the world and throughout the cosmos?

After all, do you know what you were and where you were before your appearance as a human being on earth? Do you know who you are, beyond your name and personality? And do you know where you will be when you one day stop breathing and all brain activity in the body you now reside in goes silent?

Note to the reader: This essay also appears on my new website EverydaySpiritualHealth.com, where all future content will eventually live.”