Lincoln strongly opposed what actually happened, the violent ending of slavery in the South. He had preferred a containment strategy, preventing its expansion to the West, after which it would die out gradually. In a counterfactual world, if there had been no Civil War, slavery probably would have withered away within a few decades. It had been outlawed in the British Commonwealth by the 1840s after public opinion gradually but inevitably turned against it, and it ended in its last outpost, Brazil, by 1888. It would have died in the South eventually, with or without war. Lincoln was realistic in his attempt to compromise: his policy of “containment” might well have worked if given a chance.
It is no accident that Lincoln’s greatest political hero was Senator Henry Clay, from the border state of Kentucky, the great compromiser of 1850. Lincoln, like Gandhi, admired compromise. Gandhi thought that sincere negotiation—extensive efforts at compromise—needed to fail fully before any nonviolent action began. Nonviolent resistance, like war, was a last resort, not an initial tactic. Lincoln pursued a similar philosophy throughout the 1850s, to the exasperation of abolitionists. After Fort Sumter, he realized that compromise was lost. He had hoped that slavery could be ended peacefully, but he was not given that option.
Before the war, then, Lincoln tried to be a truly national leader, sympathizing with both North and South, and thus distrusted by both. Despite his efforts, and a realistic assessment of what could have been, both extremes in North and South united to bring on a war that Lincoln had feverishly striven to avoid. When it came, Lincoln realistically turned to winning it.
LIKE MOST NORTHERNERS, the new president initially hoped the war could end speedily—an aberrant revolt quickly put down, like the Whiskey Rebellion of 1786. So he continued to push his moderate agenda: maintain the Union; limit, but do not abolish, slavery. He tried not to provoke greater Southern resentment than already existed, especially in the border states. Said the realist president, “I would like to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.” (Kentucky remained in the Union, despite being a slave state.) He believed that though slavery was evil, its solution did not entail equal civil rights. Instead, he proposed returning American blacks to their “homeland,” the new state of Liberia in West Africa. In August 1862, black leaders who met with Lincoln in the White House were struck by his insensitivity. He called slavery the “greatest wrong inflicted on any people,” but denied any possibility of racial equality. It was a fact, he stated, not a matter for debate that “you and we are different. . . . It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.” His visitors felt he was lecturing them on this subject, rather than discussing it with them. Frederick Douglass wasn’t present at this meeting, but when he was told about it, he felt compelled to write a scathing attack on Lincoln.
This is not the Abraham Lincoln of schoolbook lore: this realistic president was shrewd, even harsh. He was the ultimate politician, trying to keep all sides happy. He also could be a ruthless politician, willing to sacrifice his natural allies to mollify his strident enemies.
Yet one year after this meeting, Lincoln would issue the Emancipation Proclamation; he would give up all pretense of saving slavery anywhere or of avoiding hurt feelings among its sympathizers; he never spoke of repatriation to Africa again; and beginning in 1863, he began to arm American blacks, eventually putting about 150,000 former slaves in the Union army, along with another 40,000 blacks who had been free before the war; in total, blacks would eventually compose more than 10 percent of the Union force. Douglass became a Lincoln supporter, and in 1864 the first black invitee to a presidential inaugural ball. In the East Room of the White House, amid many prominent celebrants, Lincoln called out, “Here comes my friend Douglass. I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?” When Douglass briefly replied positively, Lincoln announced to all around him, “There is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.”
Lincoln’s power should not be overstated: Congress, pushed by the abolitionist radicals, led the way on emancipation. Emancipation was already a reality: tens of thousands of Southern slaves liberated themselves by deserting to the Union lines. But Lincoln saw this reality, and he was enough of a realist to know that he must change his position quickly to adapt to it.
Some historians think the war changed Lincoln, making him more empathic with American blacks. Equally important, I think, was Lincoln’s evolving realistic assessment of what racial relations would become in postwar America. Between the cold 1862 meeting with black leaders and the Emancipation Proclamation a year later, much blood was shed: Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Antietam. Lincoln realized that this war had only just begun, and that no rapid resolution and reconstruction was possible. The Union had been dissolved, as a matter of fact, and it would not be restored easily.
LINCOLN CLEARLY EMPATHIZED with slaves, yet his equally strong realism had prevented him from subscribing to radical abolitionism. His war experiences, in particular the gallantry of black soldiers in the Union army, made him empathize even more with blacks. In March 1864, he gave a speech to Indiana soldiers in which he commented, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” Meanwhile, the real political and social facts had also changed forever.
By 1864, Lincoln knew that the status quo ante could not be restored: Southern slavery could never return. And yet the South would not accept pure equality. How were these two opposing realities to be reconciled? Lincoln struggled with this conundrum in his final year, as all of America would for decades thereafter.
Perhaps Lincoln would have done no better than Andrew Johnson and President Grant and others. We cannot say. There were so many problems to wrestle with: profound racial hatred, an exhausted nation, a demobilizing army; so many wounds, so little balm. But Lincoln’s second inaugural address at least suggests a general line of thinking that seems to interweave realism and empathy in a manner rarely seen among American presidents. Even after Gettysburg and Vicksburg and the destruction of Atlanta, in the face of approaching military victory, Lincoln unfurled no “Mission Accomplished” banners. He did not bask in success; instead, he reached out to his enemies, tried to commune with them, presaging Martin Luther King’s advice that when your enemy is most vulnerable, when you could hurt him badly, that is when you must not do it. A psychological wisdom, a mix of realism and empathy, lay behind these classic words:
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. . . . If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bonds-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
IN RECONSTRUCTION YEARS, an us-against-them mentality evolved in both North and South. The few leaders of unimpeachable stature, like Lee in the South and Sherman in the North, refused to risk their reputations to heal festering resentments. An exception was General James Longstreet, then a New Orleans–based Republican, who, after publicly expressing support for voting rights for blacks, was branded a “traitor” and a “scalawag” in an 1867 editorial in the New Orleans Times, which was widely reprinted throughout the South. The problems of Reconstruction seemed intractable, among them: How could black civil and voting rights be protected, while Southern white opinion was gradually
directed toward incorporating the black minority into its civic life?
In the end, the Civil War replaced slavery with segregation. The nation would have to wait for another depressive leader to end another century of racism. Only the radically empathic politics of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent resistance movement would complete that great task that remained. Lincoln had ended slavery legally; King would end it morally. The first had required military force; the second needed soul-force.
PART THREE
EMPATHY
CHAPTER 6
MIRROR NEURON ON THE WALL
Love, agape, empathy—whether in English, Greek, or modern jargon, human life entails this basic principle: dependence of everyone on everyone else, the existential equality of all persons. When depressed, one knows the truth of empathy—that our fundamental similarities make us feel similarly—more viscerally and painfully than normal people do. We’ve already seen the extent to which Lincoln and Sherman drew on their empathy. A few leaders, like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., who were intimately familiar with depression, made empathy the core of their political method. The politics of radical empathy, I believe, is the psychological underpinning of nonviolent resistance. Depression reveals the truth of empathy, and empathy, in turn, engenders unexpected powers of leadership.
Negative emotions like pain and suffering have generated more psychiatric interest than positive ones like empathy. Putting the self-help genre aside, serious works on empathy are rare. What little we know scientifically is of recent vintage. The very term didn’t exist until the 1850s (originally to express how one appreciates a work of art, like a painting), and was applied to psychology in 1903 by the German physician Theodor Lipps. Einfühlung was the word he applied: Ein means “into,” and Fühlung means “feeling.” Thus empathy was feeling into another person’s experience. Though this has been the usual interpretation, empathy can be equally interpreted to mean “one feeling,” reflecting not so much imagining oneself in another person’s place but actually experiencing what the other person is experiencing. Though the concept of empathy originated in an aesthetic sensibility of beauty, Lipps adapted it to the realm of human suffering. Indeed, the English translation, made by 1910, captures this usage from Greek roots: em means “into,” pathos is “suffering”—“into suffering.” Ten years after Lipps, Karl Jaspers made empathy central to psychiatry, a revolutionary idea at the time. (Jaspers divided all mental illness into those conditions with which one could empathize, such as depression and anxiety, and those with which one could not empathize, like schizophrenia.) Jaspers’s insight was ignored by psychoanalysis and behaviorism, the two strongest currents of twentieth-century psychology. In recent years, though, empathy has made a comeback, sparked from an unexpected quarter for such a touchy-feely concept: neuroscience.
THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF EMPATHY begins with the observation that only 3 percent of animals are monogamous. Besides humans, the only other monogamous primate species is the orangutan; chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary cousins, are highly polygamous. Researchers have long wondered about this disparity, and what might constitute the biological basis of monogamy. These questions led them to the biology of empathy.
The humble vole (genus Microtus) proved centrally important. The prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster) is monogamous, but the montane vole (Microtus montanus) is polygamous. Thomas Insel and associates at the National Institute of Mental Health found that the brain hormone oxytocin affects the bonding and sexual habits of these rodents. The brain of the monogamous prairie vole contains many oxytocin receptors, especially in regions involving emotion processing. In contrast, the polygamous montane vole has few oxytocin receptors, and they occur in brain regions less involved with processing emotions. These neurological differences may produce changes in behavior: montane voles live by themselves; prairie voles live together as male/ female pairs. The only time montane voles briefly cohabit is immediately after the birth of babies, when the mother nurses and raises her offspring. During that period, oxytocin receptors markedly increase in the mother montane vole’s brain.
Oxytocin is the sex hormone par excellence: its levels spike during sexual activity between voles. But oxytocin has broader social effects; it is a kind of glue that bonds living things together. If oxytocin is injected into prairie voles, they have sex. If researchers prevent them from having sex, and then give them a shot of oxytocin, the voles groom and snuggle each other. (These effects are less visible in the montane vole, because of its relatively few oxytocin receptors.) In mice, one can remove the entire oxytocin receptor gene experimentally, producing animals without any oxytocin receptors at all. In these poor creatures, social memory is absent: such a mouse can’t recall another mouse it met before, and each mouse isolates itself from other mice. In humans, as in voles, oxytocin activity peaks during orgasm, and is high during childbirth and breastfeeding.
In short, oxytocin is something like a love drug that produces feelings of emotional attachment in socially significant moments—like sex or breastfeeding. Its constant presence is associated with sociability, its absence with isolation. One might well wonder whether people with great empathy naturally have lots of oxytocin receptors.
THE NEXT HINT about empathy came from studying macaques, long the subjects of research by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his associates at the University of Parma, Italy. The NIMH scientists discovered how empathy worked in the brain; the Italian scientists discovered where empathy worked in the brain. When a macaque moved his arm or leg, the motor cortex of its brain lit up as expected; the motor cortex oversees the body’s movements. But a few other parts of the brain lit up as well: the insula, which is involved in processing emotions, and the anterior cingulate gyrus, a large collection of fibers at the center of the brain that unite its two hemispheres. This was interesting; why were these extra parts of the brain lighting up, even though they didn’t control any muscle movement?
Even more interesting, the researchers discovered that when one of them moved his hand in view of the macaque, the monkey’s insula and cingulate gyrus lit up, but not the motor cortex. Then one monkey was placed in front of another: monkey A moved his hand; in the brain of monkey B, a different monkey, again the insula and cingulate gyrus became active, but not the motor cortex. The brain acted as if the experimental monkey were moving his hand when in fact the monkey was only watching someone else moving his hand. These neurons “mirrored” the activity of another being. Similar research has since shown that some of the neurons that fire when one feels pain will also fire when he witnesses someone else in pain. Here is empathy itself, lighting up on a brain scan. Coining the term “mirror neuron system,” researchers found that 10 percent of the human brain is wired to turn on as if it is doing what it is only observing.
One-tenth of the brain is wired for empathy.
ALL OF THIS RESEARCH adds up to one conclusion: empathy is not a vague concept; it is a neurobiological fact. We are wired, literally, to feel the movements, emotions, and pain of others. So we should take empathy seriously, including its psychological effects. Psychologists divide empathy into different parts—cognitive, affective, motor, and sensory—distinctions that, though a bit abstract, are useful. Cognitive empathy means thinking another person’s thoughts: I recognize that you have your own set of thoughts, and I try to understand what those thoughts are. Affective empathy involves feeling an emotion that another person feels: I am sad when I see that you’re sad; one baby starts to cry, others follow suit. Motor empathy relates to moving the way another moves: the infant sees an adult smile, and she smiles. Sensory empathy means feeling a physical sensation that another person feels: you’re in pain, and then I am; you’re nauseated, and I feel it too. This experience happens sometimes during pregnancy, when the male partner can experience a woman’s morning sickness, bloating, and even pain during contractions. Doctors call it pseudocyesis, or false pregnancy—the ultimate empathy.
There’s a reason we’re wired for empathy.
We can’t understand each other through words alone; we need to touch, to feel, to stroke each other emotionally and even physically. It is generally estimated that at least one-half of human communication is nonverbal. This is an incredible and underappreciated fact. No wonder emotionally charged emails and text messages are so easily misunderstood; they tell only half the story. Just as important as the content of one’s message is the tone with which one delivers it, the expression on one’s face, even one’s posture. Without empathy, we can barely communicate with each other. Empathy is, it seems, central to the human (and rodent and primate) experience.
BESIDES BEING BORN with plenty of oxytocin receptors, how can one attain a high degree of empathy? One answer, I believe, is to be depressed. In one study, severely depressed patients had much higher scores on empathy scales than a college student control group; the more depressed patients were, the higher their empathy scores. This enhanced empathy was emotional, not cognitive; it reflected an actual sensation of sharing others’ feelings, not merely an intellectual understanding of those feelings. This research suggests an important conclusion: when the depressive episode is over (and, short of suicide, all depressive periods end, usually within a year after they start), the intense experience of emotional identification with others might leave a lasting mental legacy. Emotional empathy, produced by the severe depressive episode, may prepare the mind for a long-term habit of appreciating others’ points of view.
This is suggested by another study, in which patients with various psychiatric illnesses (depression, schizophrenia, personality and anxiety disorders) completed an empathy scale and measures of current or past suicidal thoughts or attempts. Various scales have been developed to measure empathy; they involve self-description of how often one appears to understand the emotions or thoughts of others. The Interpersonal Reactivity Index, used in this study, consists of twenty-eight questions that measure four behaviors: “perspective taking” or “the tendency to spontaneously adopt the psychological view of others in everyday life”; “empathic concern” or “the tendency to experience feelings of sympathy or compassion for unfortunate others”; “personal distress” or the “tendency to experience distress or discomfort in response to extreme distress in others”; and “fantasy” or “the tendency to imaginatively transpose oneself into fictional situations.” These patients were in standard outpatient treatment and had few if any symptoms of their disease at the time of the study. They then read a brief story about a woman who committed suicide by overdose. Researchers expected that those subjects who were or had been suicidal would sympathize with the woman in the story, but in fact those who had never been suicidal were more sympathetic. The exceptions were depressed subjects with past suicidality; they were especially sympathetic to the story.
A First-Rate Madness Page 8