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.
The Dark Side
Have you ever heard of an organ
ization 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:
As long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and a researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
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.
Torture requires an appreciation of what others think or feel. To attach electrodes to the genitals of prisoners, hang them upside down for prolonged periods of time, simulate drowning during so-called “waterboarding,” or urinate on their Bible or Koran rests on our ability to assume their viewpoint and realize what will hurt or aggravate them the most. Go to any medieval torture museum, with its garrotes, chairs with spikes, head crushers, and thumb screws, and see what human imagination has wrought in the service of suffering. Our species even engages in vicarious torture. To rape a woman in front of her husband is not only brutal to her, but also a way of tormenting him. It exploits the bond one person feels with another. Cruelty, too, rests on perspective-taking.
One mental illness is marked by a permanent disconnect between perspective-taking and the deeper regions of empathy. The label of “psychopath” is often associated with violence, such as serial killers Ted Bundy and Harold Shipman, or mass murderers, such as Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and Saddam Hussein. But psychopathy takes many forms. The condition is defined by an antisocial attitude without loyalty to anyone except the self. Think of the boyfriend who leaves a woman after having emptied out her bank account, but who returns months later with a bouquet of roses for a tearful reunion so that he can move back in and start the whole cycle over again. Or the CEO who makes loads of money over the backs of others, even talking trusting employees into holding on to company stock at the very moment that he himself is unloading his shares, as Kenneth Lay did before Enron’s collapse in 2001. People without mercy and morals are all around us, often in prominent positions. These snakes in suits, as one book title labels them, may represent a small percentage of the population, but they thrive in an economic system that rewards ruthlessness.
The comparison with snakes is apt, since psychopaths seem to lack the Russian doll’s old mammalian core. They do possess all of its cognitive outer layers, allowing them to understand what others want and need as well as what their weaknesses are, but they couldn’t care less about how their behavior impacts them. According to one theory, they suffer from a developmental disorder that puts them on a wrong learning track early in life. If a normal child makes a younger sibling cry, it will be troubled by the other’s distress. The result is aversive conditioning: Children learn not to pester or hit others. Like all social animals, they discover that if you want to have fun, it isn’t a good idea to make your playmate yell out in pain. With age, children become gentler with younger, weaker parties, controlling their strength the way a large dog plays with a smaller one or a cat, or for that matter, how a 1,200-pound polar bear plays with a husky. The young psychopath, by contrast, starts life without this sensitivity. Nothing in an encounter with a vulnerable party, least of all teary protest, tells him to back off. On the contrary, all that he ever seems to learn is that hurting others yields benefits. Isn’t it an excellent way of getting toys or winning games? The young psychopath only sees the upside of defeating others. The result is a different learning curve, one that culminates in manipulation and intimidation without the slightest worry about the pain it may cause.
Being gentle with vulnerable others is something all children and animals learn during play, such as a polar bear here with a sled dog.
A lot of trouble in the world can be traced to people whose Russian doll is an empty shell. Like aliens from another planet, they are intellectually capable of adopting another’s viewpoint without any of the accompanying feelings. They successfully fake empathy. Whenever they achieve power, which they often do thanks to their Machiavellian skills, their disdain for truth and morality allows them to manipulate others into carrying out their evil plans. Their authority overrides the better judgment of underlings so that sometimes an entire nation, for example Germany in the previous century, falls for the cruel fantasies of a charismatic psychopath.
What makes it so hard to wrap our heads around this mental disorder is that we can’t imagine being immune to the suffering of others. Mark Rowlands, in The Philosopher and the Wolf, describes how hard he found it to treat his house pet. Brenin, the wolf, needed regular cleaning and antibiotics for an infection near his anus, which was excruciatingly painful for him, and by extension for his master. This is what empathy does: It makes it tough to hurt others even if done for a good reason. In a philosophical twist, Rowlands reflected on Tertullian of Carthage, a theologian of early Christianity. This zealous defender of the truth had a most unusual description of heaven. While hell was a place of torture, heaven was a balcony from which the saved ones could watch hell, thus enjoying the spectacle of others frying. One must indeed be close to psychopathy to imagine eternal spite as a blessed state. For most of us, it’s almost harder to watch the suffering of others than to suffer ourselves, which is why Rowland adds, “In those days that Brenin was dying, I used to think that this was what hell was—being forced to torture a wolf I loved.”
All of this is to contrast those who do empathize with those who don’t. This is not to say, though, that those who do, do so all the time. What kind of life would we have if we shared in every form of suffering in the world? Empathy needs both a filter that makes us select what we react to, and a turn-off switch. Like every emotional reaction, it has a “portal,” a situation that typically triggers it or that we allow to trigger it. Empathy’s chief portal is identification. We’re ready to share the feelings of someone we identify with, which is why we do so easily with those who belong to our inner circle: For them the portal is always ajar. Outside this circle, things are optional. It depends on whether we can afford being affected, or whether we want to be. If we notice a beggar in the street, we can choose to look at him, which may arouse our pity, or we can look away, even walk to the other side of the street, to avoid facing him. We have all sorts of ways to open or close the portal.
The moment we buy a movie ticket, we choose to identify with the leading character, thus making ourselves vulnerable to empathizing. We swoon when she falls in love or leave the theater in tears because of her untimely death, even though it’s just a character played by someone we don’t personally know. On the other hand, we sometimes deliberately shut the portal, such as when we suppress identification with a declared enemy group. We do so by removing their individuality, defining them as an anonymous mass of unpleasant, inferior specimens of a different taxonomic group. Why should we put up with those dirty “cockroaches” (the Hutus about the Tutsis) or disease-ridden “rats” (the Nazis about the Jews)? Called the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, dehumanization has a long history of excusing atrocities.
Since men are the more territorial gender, and overall more confrontational and violent tha
n women, one would expect them to have the more effective turn-off switch. They clearly do have empathy, but perhaps apply it more selectively. Cross-cultural studies confirm that women everywhere are considered more empathic than men, so much so that the claim has been made that the female (but not the male) brain is hardwired for empathy. I doubt that the difference is that absolute, but it’s true that at birth girl babies look longer at faces than boy babies, who look longer at suspended mechanical mobiles. Growing up, girls are more prosocial than boys, better readers of emotional expressions, more attuned to voices, more remorseful after having hurt someone, and better at taking another’s perspective. When Carolyn Zahn-Waxler measured reactions to distressed family members, she found girls looking more at the other’s face, providing more physical comfort, and more often expressing concern, such as asking “Are you okay?” Boys are less attentive to the feelings of others, more action- and object-oriented, rougher in their play, and less inclined to social fantasy games. They prefer collective action, such as building something together.
The Age of Empathy Page 23