The Age of Empathy (25 page)

In our chimpanzee colony, active information-sharing occurred when the always intrepid Katie was digging into the dirt underneath a large tractor tire. Katie uttered soft “hoo” alarm calls during the job, then pulled out something wriggly that looked like a live maggot. She was holding it away from herself between her index and middle finger, a bit like a cigarette. First she sniffed it and then turned and showed it to others, including her mother, holding it up with an outstretched arm. Katie then dropped the object and moved off. Her mother, Georgia, came over and started digging at the same spot. She pulled out something, sniffed at it, and immediately started to alarm bark, but much louder than her daughter had done. She dropped the object and sat down at a distance, still alarm-calling to herself. Then the young daughter of Georgia’s sister (Katie’s niece) went to the same exact spot under the tire and pulled out something. She walked
bipedally over to Georgia and held the object up for her. Georgia now alarm-called even more intensely. Then it was all over.

Vicky Horner, who observed this sequence, thought that the object of interest must have been a disgusting dead rat or something else under the tire that the apes could smell and that was covered with maggots, but she couldn’t be sure.

What makes information-sharing interesting is that it relies on the same comparison of one’s own perspective with that of someone else—detecting something that others need to know about—which also underlies advanced empathy. Perhaps the capacity to do so appeared only in those few species with a strong sense of self, which is also what permits two-year-old children to engage in such behavior. But very soon children go further, and information-sharing becomes an obsession with them. They feel the need to comment on everything, and ask about everything. This seems uniquely human and may have to do with our linguistic specialization. Language requires consensus, which can’t be achieved without continual comparing and testing.

If I point out an animal in the distance and say “zebra,” and you disagree, saying “lion,” we have a problem that, at other times, may get us into deep trouble. It’s a uniquely human problem, but so important to us that deictic gestures and language evolution are closely intertwined.

Fair Is Fair

I
n the early spring of 1940, with Nazi troops marching on the city, the population of Paris packed up and fled. In
Suite Française,
eyewitness Irène Némirovsky—who would perish in Auschwitz a few years later—describes how the wealthy lost everything in this mass exodus, including their privileges. They would start out with servants and cars, packing their jewelry and carefully wrapping up their precious porcelain, but soon their servants would abandon them, gas would run out, the cars would fall apart, and the porcelain, well, who cares when survival is at stake?

Even though Némirovsky herself came from a wealthy background, between the lines of her novel the reader detects a certain satisfaction that at times of crisis class differences fade. There’s an element of justice to the fact that when everybody suffers, the upper
crust suffers, too. High-handed manners that normally would get aristocrats into a hotel, for example, don’t help when all rooms are filled to the brim, and an aristocrat’s stomach responds the same to being empty as everyone else’s. The only difference is that the upper class feels the indignity of the situation more keenly:

Passages like these seem almost designed to induce the opposite of empathy: Schadenfreude. They exploit the secret satisfaction we take in the misfortune of the rich. Never the poor, which is telling. We humans are complex characters who easily form social hierarchies, yet in fact have an aversion to them, and who readily sympathize with others, unless we feel envious, threatened, or concerned about our own welfare. We walk on two legs: a social and a selfish one. We tolerate differences in status and income only up to a degree, and begin to root for the underdog as soon as this boundary is overstepped. We have a deeply ingrained sense of fairness, which derives from our long history as egalitarians.

That we differ from apes in our attitude toward social hierarchy struck me most acutely when chimpanzees failed to react to events that cracked me up.

The first time occurred when a powerful alpha male, Yeroen, was in the midst of an intimidation display with all of his hair on end. This is nothing to make fun of. All other apes watch with trepidation, knowing that a male in this testosterone-filled state is keen to make
his point: He is the boss. Anyone who gets in the way risks a serious beating. Moving like a furry steam locomotive that would flatten everybody and everything, Yeroen went with heavy steps up a leaning tree trunk that he often stamped on in a steady rhythm until the whole thing would shake and creak to amplify his message of strength and stamina. Every alpha male comes up with his own special effects. It had rained, however, and the trunk was slippery, which explains why at the peak of this spectacle the mighty leader slipped and fell. He held on to the trunk for a second, then dropped to the grass, where he sat looking around, disoriented. With a “the show must go on” attitude, he then wrapped up his performance by running straight at a group of onlookers, scattering them amid screams of fear.

Even though Yeroen’s plunge made me laugh out loud, as far as I could tell none of the chimps saw anything remotely comical. They kept their eyes on him as if this was all part of the same show, even though, clearly, it was not how Yeroen had intended things to go. A similar incident happened in a different colony, when the alpha male picked up a hard plastic ball during his display. He often threw this ball up in the air with as much force as possible—the higher the better—after which it would come down somewhere with a loud thud. This time, however, he threw the ball up and checked around with a puzzled expression because the ball had miraculously disappeared. He didn’t know that it was returning to earth by the same trajectory he had launched it on, landing with a smack on his own back. This startled him, and he broke off his display. Again, I found this a rather amusing sight, but none of the chimps showed any reaction that I could tell. Had they been human, they’d have been rolling around, holding their bellies with laughter, or—if fear kept them from doing so—they’d have been pinching one another, turning purple in an attempt to control themselves.

Attributed to St. Bonaventura, a thirteenth-century theologian, the saying “The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its behind” illustrates what we think of higher-ups. In fact, the saying applies better to humans than monkeys. My own reactions fit this mold
in that I perceived the incongruity of a top individual making a fool of himself during a show of pomp and power, the same way that we can’t suppress a laugh when political leaders make embarrassing gaffes or find themselves in their underpants attached to a dancing pole at a strip club. The Australian politician to whom the latter happened during a police raid said it had taught him two lessons: “Don’t let anyone handcuff you to a post and make sure you always wear clean underwear.”

Our species has a distinctly subversive streak that ensures that, however much we look up to those in power, we’re always happy to bring them down a peg. Present-day egalitarians, who range from hunter-gatherers to horticulturalists, show the same tendency. They emphasize sharing and suppress distinctions of wealth and power. The would-be chief who gets it into his head that he can order others around is openly told how amusing he is. People laugh in his face as well as behind his back. Christopher Boehm, an American anthropologist interested in how tribal communities level the hierarchy, has found that leaders who become bullies, are self-aggrandizing, fail to redistribute goods, or deal with outsiders to their own advantage quickly lose respect and support. The weapons against them are ridicule, gossip, and disobedience, but egalitarians are not beyond more drastic measures. A chief who appropriates the livestock of other men or forces their wives into sexual relations risks death.

Social hierarchies may have been out of fashion when our ancestors lived in small-scale societies, but they surely made a comeback with agricultural settlement and the accumulation of wealth. But the tendency to subvert these vertical arrangements never left us. We’re born revolutionaries. Even Sigmund Freud recognized this unconscious desire, speculating that human history began when frustrated sons banded together to eliminate their imperious father, who kept all women away from them. The sexual connotations of Freud’s origin story may serve as metaphor for all of our political and economic dealings, a connection confirmed by brain research. Wanting to see how humans make financial decisions, economists found that while weighing monetary risks, the same areas in men’s brains light up as
when they’re watching titillating sexual images. In fact, after having seen such images, men throw all caution overboard and gamble more money than they normally would. In the words of one neuroeconomist, “The link between sex and greed goes back hundreds of thousands of years, to men’s evolutionary role as provider or resource gatherer to attract women.”

This doesn’t sound much like the rational profit maximizers that economists make us out to be. Traditional economic models don’t consider the human sense of fairness, even though it demonstrably affects economic decisions. They also ignore human emotions in general, even though the brain of
Homo economicus
barely distinguishes sex from money. Advertisers know this all too well, which is why they often pair expensive items, such as cars or watches, with attractive women. But economists prefer to imagine a hypothetical world driven by market forces and rational choice rooted in self-interest. This world does fit some members of the human race, who act purely selfishly and take advantage of others without compunction. In most experiments, however, such people are in the minority. The majority is altruistic, cooperative, sensitive to fairness, and oriented toward community goals. The level of trust and cooperation among them exceeds predictions from economic models.

We obviously have a problem if assumptions are out of whack with actual human behavior. The danger of thinking that we are nothing but calculating opportunists is that it pushes us precisely toward such behavior. It undermines trust in others, thus making us cautious rather than generous. As explained by American economist Robert Frank,

Frank believes that a purely selfish outlook is, ironically, not in our own best interest. It narrows our view to the point that we’re reluctant to engage in the long-term emotional commitments that have served our lineage so well for millions of years. If we truly were the cunning schemers that economists say we are, we’d forever be hunting hare, whereas our prey could be stag.

The latter refers to a dilemma, first posited by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in
A Discourse on Inequality,
that is gaining popularity among game theorists. It’s the choice between the small rewards of individualism and the large rewards of collective action. Two hunters need to decide between each going off alone after hare or both sticking together and bringing home stag—much bigger game even if halved. In our societies, we have successfully formalized layers of trust (allowing us to pay with credit cards, for example, not because the shop owner trusts us, but because he trusts the card company, which in turn trusts us), which means that we engage in complex stag hunts. But we don’t do so unconditionally. With some people we embark on cooperative ventures more willingly than with others. Productive partnerships require a history of give-and-take and proven loyalty. Only then do we accomplish goals larger than ourselves.

The difference is dramatic. In 1953, eight mountaineers got into trouble on K2, one of the highest and most dangerous peaks in the world. In –40º Celsius temperatures, one member of the team developed a blood clot in his leg. Even though it was life-threatening for the others to descend with an incapacitated comrade, no one considered leaving him behind. The solidarity of this group has gone down in history as legendary. Contrast this with the recent drama, in 2008, in which eleven mountaineers perished on K2 after having abandoned their common cause. One survivor lamented the drive for self-preservation: “Everybody was fighting for himself, and I still don’t understand why everybody were
[sic]
leaving each other.”