The Age of Empathy (32 page)

If I were God, I’d work on the reach of empathy.

Fostering empathy isn’t made easier by the entrenched opinion in law schools, business schools, and political corridors that we are essentially competitive animals. Social Darwinism may be dismissed as old hat, a leftover of the Victorian era, but it’s still very much with us. A 2007 column by David Brooks in
The New York Times
ridiculed social government programs: “From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become
clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest.” Conservatives love to think this.

I am not saying that their viewpoint lacks any substance, but anyone looking for a rationale of how to structure society should realize that this is only half the truth. It misses by a mile the intensely social nature of our species. Empathy is part of our evolution, and not just a recent part, but an innate, age-old capacity. Relying on automated sensitivities to faces, bodies, and voices, humans empathize from day one. It’s really not as complex a skill as it has been made out to be, such as when empathy is said to rest on the attribution of mental states to others, or the ability to consciously recall one’s own experiences. No one denies the importance of these higher strata of empathy, which develop with age, but to focus on them is like staring at a splendid cathedral while forgetting that it’s made of bricks and mortar.

Martin Hoffman, who has written extensively on this topic, rightly noted that our relations with others are more basic than we think: “Humans must be equipped biologically to function effectively in many social situations without undue reliance on cognitive processes.” Even though we are certainly capable of imaginative ways of getting into someone else’s head, this is not how we operate most of the time. When we pull a crying child onto our lap, or exchange an understanding smile with a spouse, we’re engaged in everyday empathy that is rooted as much in our bodies as in our minds.

In my attempt to strip empathy down to its bare bones, I’ve made nonhumans an explicit part of the discussion. Not everyone agrees. Some scientists turn into “hear no evil, speak no evil” monkeys, slamming their hands over their ears and mouths, as soon as talk turns to the internal states of other animals. Putting emotional labels on human behavior is fine, but when it comes to animals, we’re supposed to suppress this habit. The reason most of us find this almost impossible to do is that humans “mentalize” automatically. Mentalization offers a shortcut to behavior around us. Instead of making piecemeal observations of the way our boss reacts to our late arrival (he frowns,
gets red in the face, bangs the table, and so on), we integrate all of this information into a single evaluation (he is mad). We frame the behavior around us according to perceived goals, desires, needs, and emotions. This works great with our boss (even though it hardly improves our situation), and applies equally well to a dog who bounds toward us with wagging tail versus another dog who growls at us with lowered head and bristling fur. We call the first dog “happy” and the second “angry,” even though many scientists scoff at the implication of mental states. They prefer terms such as “playful” or “aggressive.” The poor dogs are doing everything to make their feelings known, yet science throws itself into linguistic knots to avoid mentioning them.

Obviously, I don’t agree with this caution. For the Darwinist, there is nothing more logical than the assumption of emotional continuity. Ultimately, I believe that the reluctance to talk about animal emotions has less to do with science than religion. And not just any religion, but particularly religions that arose in isolation from animals that look like us. With monkeys and apes around every corner, no rain forest culture has ever produced a religion that places humans outside of nature. Similarly, in the East—surrounded by native primates in India, China, and Japan—religions don’t draw a sharp line between humans and other animals. Reincarnation occurs in many shapes and forms: A man may become a fish and a fish may become God. Monkey gods, such as Hanuman, are common. Only the Judeo-Christian religions place humans on a pedestal, making them the only species with a soul. It’s not hard to see how desert nomads might have arrived at this view. Without animals to hold up a mirror to them, the notion that we’re alone came naturally to them. They saw themselves as created in God’s image and as the only intelligent life on earth. Even today, we’re so convinced of this that we search for other such life by training powerful telescopes on distant galaxies.

It’s extremely telling how Westerners reacted when they finally did get to see animals capable of challenging these notions. When the first live apes went on display, people couldn’t believe their eyes. In 1835, a male chimpanzee arrived at London Zoo, clothed in a sailor’s
suit. He was followed by a female orangutan, who was put in a dress. Queen Victoria went to see the exhibit, and was appalled. She called the apes “frightful, and painfully and disagreeably human.” This was a widespread sentiment, and even nowadays I occasionally meet people who call apes “disgusting.” How can they feel like this unless apes are telling them something about themselves that they don’t want to hear? When the same apes at the London Zoo were studied by the young Charles Darwin, he shared the queen’s conclusion but without her revulsion. Darwin felt that anyone convinced of man’s superiority ought to go take a look at these apes.

All of this occurred in the not too distant past, long after Western religion had spread its creed of human exceptionalism to all corners of knowledge. Philosophy inherited the creed when it blended with theology, and the social sciences inherited it when they emerged out of philosophy. After all, psychology was named after Psykhe, the Greek goddess of the soul. These religious roots are reflected in continued resistance to the second message of evolutionary theory. The first is that all plants and animals, including ourselves, are the product of a single process. This is now widely accepted, also outside biology. But the second message is that we are continuous with all other life forms, not only in body but also in mind. This remains hard to swallow. Even those who recognize humans as a product of evolution keep searching for that one divine spark, that one “huge anomaly” that sets us apart. The religious connection has long been pushed to the subconscious, yet science keeps looking for something special that we as a species can be proud of.

When it comes to characteristics that we
don’t
like about ourselves, continuity is rarely an issue. As soon as people kill, abandon, rape, or otherwise mistreat one another we are quick to blame it on our genes. Warfare and aggression are widely recognized as biological traits, and no one thinks twice about pointing at ants or chimps for parallels. It’s only with regard to noble characteristics that continuity is an issue, and empathy is a case in point. Toward the end of a long career, many a scientist cannot resist producing a synopsis of
what distinguishes us from the brutes. American psychologist David Premack focused on causal reasoning, culture, and the taking of another’s perspective, while his colleague Jerome Kagan mentioned language, morality, and yes, empathy. Kagan included consolation behavior, such as a child embracing his mother, who has hurt herself. This is indeed a great example, but of course hardly restricted to our species. My main point, however, is not whether the proposed distinctions are real or imagined, but why all of them need to be in our favor. Aren’t humans at least equally special with respect to torture, genocide, deception, exploitation, indoctrination, and environmental destruction? Why does every list of human distinctiveness need to have the flavor of a feel-good note?

There is a deeper problem, though, which brings me back to the status we assign empathy in society. If being sensitive to others were truly limited to our species, this would make it a young trait, something we evolved only recently. The problem with young traits, however, is that they tend to be experimental. Consider the human back. When our ancestors started walking on two legs, their backs straightened and assumed a vertical position. In doing so, backs became the bearers of extra weight. Since this is not what the vertebral column was originally designed for, chronic back pain became our species’ universal curse.

If empathy were truly like a toupee put on our head yesterday, my greatest fear would be that it might blow off tomorrow. Linking empathy to our frontal lobes, which achieved their extraordinary size only in the last couple of million years, denies how much it is a part of who and what we are. Obviously, I believe the exact opposite, which is that empathy is part of a heritage as ancient as the mammalian line. Empathy engages brain areas that are more than a hundred million years old. The capacity arose long ago with motor mimicry and emotional contagion, after which evolution added layer after layer, until our ancestors not only felt what others felt, but understood what others might want or need. The full capacity seems put together like a Russian doll. At its core is an automated process shared with a multitude
of species, surrounded by outer layers that fine-tune its aim and reach. Not all species possess all layers: Only a few take another’s perspective, something we are masters at. But even the most sophisticated layers of the doll normally remain firmly tied to its primal core.

Empathy is multilayered, like a Russian doll, with at its core the ancient tendency to match another’s emotional state. Around this core, evolution has built ever more sophisticated capacities, such as feeling concern for others and adopting their viewpoint.

Evolution rarely throws out anything. Structures are transformed, modified, co-opted for other functions, or tweaked in another direction. Thus the frontal fins of fish became the front limbs of land animals, which over time turned into hooves, paws, wings, and hands. They also became the flippers of mammals that returned to the water. This is why to the biologist a Russian doll is such a satisfying plaything, especially if it has a historical dimension. I own a wooden doll of former Russian president Vladimir Putin. He is depicted on the outside, and within him we discover, in this order, Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Stalin, and Lenin. Finding a tiny little Lenin and Stalin within Putin will hardly surprise most political analysts. But the same is true for biological traits: The old remains present in the new. This is relevant to the story of empathy since it means that even our most thoughtful reactions to others share core processes with the reactions of young children, other primates, elephants, dogs, and rodents.

I derive great optimism from empathy’s evolutionary antiquity. It makes it a robust trait that will develop in virtually every human being so that society can count on it and try to foster and grow it. It is a human universal. In this regard, it’s like our tendency to form social hierarchies, which we share with so many animals, and which we don’t need to teach or explain to children: They arrange themselves spontaneously into pecking orders before we know it. What society does instead is either enhance this tendency, as is done in male bastions
such as the church or the military, or counter it, as done in small-scale egalitarian societies. In the same way, human empathy is so ingrained that it will almost always find expression, giving us material to work with either by countering it, as we do when we dehumanize our enemies, or by enhancing it, as when we urge a child who is hogging all the toys to be more considerate of her playmates.

We may not be able to create a New Man, but we’re remarkably good at modifying the old one.

Have you ever heard of an organization that appeals to empathy in order to fight the lack of it? That the world needs such an organization, known as Amnesty International, says a lot about the dark side of our species. British author J. K. Rowling describes an experience during her time working at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London:

If empathy were purely intellectual, a product of our prefrontal cortex, the
Harry Potter
author wouldn’t have felt anything special at hearing the man’s scream, nor would she have remembered it all of her life. But empathy goes a thousand times deeper: It touches parts of the brain where screams don’t just register, but induce fear and loathing. We literally
feel
a scream. We should be grateful for this, because otherwise there would be no reason for empathy to be used for
good. In and of itself, taking another’s perspective is a neutral capacity: It can serve both constructive and destructive ends. Crimes against humanity often rely on precisely this capacity.