To prepare, Singer had Ricard watch a documentary the evening before about lonely orphans in a Romanian institution. When sliding his brain under the scanner the next day, Singer asked him to recall their vacant eyes. Their spindly limbs. Ricard did as she asked, imagining as fiercely as he could how those Romanian orphans felt.
An hour later, he was a wreck.
Because that’s what empathy does to us. It’s exhausting. In a later experiment, Singer asked a group of volunteers to spend fifteen minutes with their eyes shut evoking as much empathy as possible, every day for one week. This was about as long as they could endure. At the end of the week, all participants were more pessimistic. One woman said that when she looked at fellow passengers in the train afterwards, all she could see was suffering.11
After her first session with Ricard, Singer decided to try something different. Once again, she asked the monk to think about the Romanian orphans, but this time he wasn’t to imagine himself in their shoes. Rather, she wanted him to apply the skill he’d spent years perfecting, feeling not with them, but for them. Instead of sharing in their distress, Ricard concentrated on calling up feelings of warmth, concern and care. Instead of personally experiencing their suffering, he kept himself removed from it.
On her monitor, Singer could instantly see the difference, because wholly different parts of Ricard’s brain lit up. Empathy mostly activates the anterior insula, which sits just above our ears, but flashing now were his corpus striatum and orbitofrontal cortex.
What was going on? Ricard’s new mentality is what we call compassion. And, unlike empathy, compassion doesn’t sap our energy. In fact, afterwards Ricard felt much better. That’s because compassion is simultaneously more controlled, remote and constructive. It’s not about sharing another person’s distress, but it does help you to recognise it and then act. Not only that, compassion injects us with energy, which is exactly what’s needed to help.
To give another example, let’s say your child is afraid of the dark. As a parent, you’re not going to crouch in a corner of the room and whimper alongside your son or daughter (empathy). Rather, you try to calm and comfort them (compassion).
So should we all start meditating like Matthieu Ricard? I confess it sounded a little new-agey to me at first, but there is some scientific evidence that meditation can train our compassion.12 The brain is a malleable organ. And if we exercise to keep our bodies in shape, why not do the same for our minds?
V: Try to understand the other, even if you don’t get where they’re coming from
To be honest, I gave meditating a shot, but it hasn’t been a huge success so far. For some reason there’s always another email, another tweet or another video of a goat on a trampoline demanding immediate attention. And meditating for 50,000 hours? Sorry, but I also have a life.
Lucky for me, there’s another way to zoom out: use the method of choice among Enlightenment philosophers back in the eighteenth century. What is it? Reason. Intellect. Our capacity to put things into rational perspective is a psychological process that enlists different parts of our brain. When we use our intellect to try to understand someone, this activates the prefrontal cortex, an area located just behind the forehead that’s exceptionally large in humans.13
Sure, I know there are scores of studies on the thousand and one cases in which this cortex drops the ball. Studies reveal we’re often not so rational and self-possessed after all. Nonetheless, I think it’s important not to overstate such findings. We use rational arguments and evidence all the time in day-to-day life, and we’ve built societies full of laws and rules and agreements. Humans think much better than we think. And our powers of reason are not a thin coating covering our emotional nature, but an essential feature of who we are and what makes us human.14
Take Norway’s vision on prisons, which can seem counterintuitive to the rest of us. By applying our intellect and examining recidivism statistics, we realise it’s an excellent way to deal with criminals. Or take Nelson Mandela’s ethic of statesmanship. Over and over he had to bite his tongue, tamp down on his emotions and stay sharp and analytical. Mandela was not only kind-hearted, he was equally astute. Having faith in others is as much a rational decision as an emotional one.
Of course, seeing where someone else is coming from doesn’t mean you need to see eye to eye. You can understand the mindset of a fascist, a terrorist, or a fan of Love Actually without jumping on the fascist, terrorist, or lover-of-sappy-movies bandwagon. (I have to say, I’m a proud member of that last group.) Understanding the other at a rational level is a skill. It’s a muscle you can train.
Where we need our capacity for reason most of all is to suppress, from time to time, our desire to be nice. Sometimes our sociable instinct gets in the way of truth and of equity. Because consider: haven’t we all seen someone treated unfairly yet kept silent to avoid being disagreeable? Haven’t we all swallowed our words just to keep the peace? Haven’t we all accused those who fight for their rights of rocking the boat?
I think that’s the great paradox of this book. I’ve argued that humans have evolved to be fundamentally sociable creatures, but sometimes our sociability is the problem. History teaches that progress often begins with people–like Buurtzorg’s Jos de Blok and Agora’s Sjef Drummen–whom others feel to be preachy or even unfriendly. People with the nerve to get on their soapbox at social occasions. Who raise unpleasant subjects that make you uneasy.
Cherish these people, because they’re the key to progress.
VI: Love your own as others love their own
On 17 July 2014, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 went down outside the village of Hrabove in Ukraine. On board were 298 passengers, 193 of them Dutch. The aircraft had been shot down by pro-Russian separatists. Nobody survived the crash.
At first, the reports–those 298 deaths–felt abstract, but then I read a story in a Dutch newspaper that struck me in the gut.15 It opened with a picture of Karlijn Keijzer (aged twenty-five) and Laurens van der Graaff (thirty); a selfie of the beaming faces of a blond guy and a curly haired girl captured just before they boarded the plane. I read that they’d met at an Amsterdam rowing club. That Laurens wrote for Propria Cures, a brilliant student newspaper, and that Karlijn had almost finished her Ph.D. in the States.
And that they were crazy about each other.
‘They will always be that head-over-heels-in-love, unable-to-keep-their-hands-off-each-other happy couple,’ a friend was quoted as saying. Isn’t it hypocritical, I asked myself, that having just skipped over a piece on atrocities in Iraq on page seven, now I was tearing up? Normally this kind of reporting bothers me. ‘Two Dutch citizens dead off the coast of Nigeria,’ the papers report, when a whole boatload of people went down.
But humans are limited creatures. We care more about those who are like us, who share the same language or appearance or background. I too was a Dutch college student once and joined a university club. I too met a girl there with gorgeous curls and I would have loved to write for Propria Cures. (‘For those who knew Laurens,’ his colleagues there wrote, ‘it came as no surprise that it would take an anti-aircraft missile to stop his powerful body.’)16
It was Karlijn’s brother who sent the paper that smiling selfie taken hours before their deaths. ‘The only thing I ask,’ he wrote, ‘is that you show the country and the world the pain that I and my other sister and parents are going through. This is the pain of hundreds of people in the Netherlands.’
And he was right. Everyone knew somebody who’d known somebody on that plane. During those days, I felt Dutch in a way I never had before.
Why do we care more about people who seem like us? In Chapter 10, I wrote that evil does its work from a distance. Distance lets us rant at strangers on the internet. Distance helps soldiers bypass their aversion to violence. And distance has enabled the most horrifying crimes in history, from slavery to the Holocaust.
But choose the path of compassion and you realise how little separates you from that str
anger. Compassion takes you beyond yourself, until those near and dear are no more or less significant than the rest of the world. Why else did the Buddha abandon his family? Why else would Jesus have instructed his disciples to leave behind their fathers and mothers, their wives and children, their brothers and sisters?
But maybe you can take this too far.
Maybe love of one’s fellow man starts small. If a person is filled with self-loathing, how can they possibly love anyone else? If someone loses sight of family and friends, how can they shoulder the burdens of this world? We can’t take on the big until we have a handle on the small. Among those 193 Dutch passengers were many men and women who were unabashedly making the world a better place, from AIDS researchers to human rights advocates. And yet, the greatest loss was to the people who were closest to them.
As humans, we differentiate. We play favourites and care more about our own. That’s nothing to be ashamed of–it makes us human. But we must also understand that those others, those distant strangers, also have families they love. That they are every bit as human as we are.
VII: Avoid the news
One of the biggest sources of distance these days is the news. Watching the evening news may leave you feeling more attuned to reality, but the truth is that it skews your view of the world. The news tends to generalise people into groups like politicians, elites, racists and refugees. Worse, the news zooms in on the bad apples.
The same is true of social media. What starts as a couple of bullies spewing hate speech at a distance gets pushed by algorithms to the top of our Facebook and Twitter feeds. It’s by tapping into our negativity bias that these digital platforms make their money, turning higher profits the worse people behave. Because bad behaviour grabs our attention, it’s what generates the most clicks, and where we click the advertising dollars follow.17 This has turned social media into systems that amplify our worst qualities.
Neurologists point out that our appetite for news and push notifications manifests all the symptoms of addiction, and Silicon Valley figured this out long ago. Managers at companies like Facebook and Google strictly limit the time their children spend on the internet and ‘social’ media. Even as education gurus sing the praises of iPads in schools and digital skills, the tech elites, like drug lords, shield their own kids from their toxic enterprise.18
My rule of thumb? I have several: steer clear of television news and push notifications and instead read a more nuanced Sunday paper and in-depth feature writing, whether online or off. Disengage from your screen and meet real people in the flesh. Think as carefully about what information you feed your mind as you do about the food you feed your body.
VIII: Don’t punch Nazis
If you’re an avid follower of the news, it’s easy to get trapped by hopelessness. What’s the point of recycling, paying taxes and donating to charities when others shirk their duty?
If you’re tempted by such thoughts, remember that cynicism is just another word for laziness. It’s an excuse not to take responsibility. Because if you believe most people are rotten, you don’t need to get worked up about injustice. The world is going to hell either way.
There’s also a kind of activism that looks suspiciously like cynicism. This is the do-gooder who’s mostly concerned with their own self-image. To go down this path is to become the rebel who knows best, doling out advice without any genuine regard for others. Bad news is then good news, because bad news (‘Global warming is speeding up!’, ‘Inequality is worse than we thought!’) proves they were right all along.19
But there’s a different way, as the small town of Wunsiedel in Germany shows. In the late 1980s, Adolf Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess was buried in the local cemetery, and Wunsiedel rapidly became a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site. Even today, skinheads march through town every year on 17 August, the anniversary of Hess’s death, hoping to incite riots and violence.
And every year, right on cue, anti-fascists come along to give the neo-Nazis exactly what they want. Inevitably, a video surfaces showing someone proudly taking a swing at some Nazi. But afterwards, the effects prove counter-productive. Just like bombing the Middle East is manna for terrorists, punching Nazis only reinforces extremists. It validates them in their worldview and makes it that much easier to attract new recruits.
Wunsiedel decided to test a different strategy. In 2014 a wisecracking German named Fabian Wichmann had a brilliant idea. What if the town turned the march for Rudolf Hess into a charity walk? Residents loved the idea. For every metre the neo-Nazis walked, the townspeople pledged to donate ten euros to Wichmann’s organisation EXIT-Deutschland, which helps people get out of far-right groups.
Ahead of the event, the townspeople marked off start and finish lines. They made banners thanking the walkers for their efforts. The neo-Nazis, meanwhile, had no idea what was afoot. On the day itself, Wunsiedel greeted them with loud cheers and showered them with confetti upon crossing the finish. All told, the event raised more than twenty thousand euros for the cause.
Wichmann emphasises that the important thing after a campaign like this is to keep the door open. In the summer of 2011 his organisation handed out T-shirts at an extremist rock festival in Germany. Emblazoned with far-right symbols, the shirts at first seemed to endorse neo-Nazi ideology. But after being washed, a different message appeared. ‘What your T-shirt can do, you can do too. We can help you free yourself from the far-right.’20
This may sound cheesy, but in subsequent weeks the number of phone calls to EXIT-Deutschland went up 300 per cent. Wichmann saw how disorienting his messages were to the neo-Nazis. Where they’d expected disgust and outrage, they got an outstretched hand.
IX. Come out of the closet: don’t be ashamed to do good
To extend that hand you need one thing above all. Courage. Because you may well be branded a bleeding heart or a show-off. ‘When you give to the needy, sound no trumpet…’ Jesus warned during the Sermon on the Mount, and ‘when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret’.21
On the face of it, this sounds like sensible advice. Who wants to be thought sanctimonious? Much safer to do your good deeds in secret, or at the very least be prepared with an excuse:
‘Just keeping busy.’
‘I didn’t need the money anyway.’
‘It’ll look good on my résumé.’
Modern psychologists have discovered that when people do something out of the goodness of their hearts, they often fabricate selfish motives. This is most prevalent in individualistic Western cultures where veneer theory is most entrenched.22 And it makes sense: if you assume most people are selfish, then any good deed is inherently suspect. As one American psychologist notes, ‘People seem loathe to acknowledge that their behaviour may have been motivated by genuine compassion or kindness.’23
Unfortunately, this reticence works like a nocebo. When you disguise yourself as an egotist, you reinforce other people’s cynical assumptions about human nature. Worse, by cloaking your good deeds, you place them in quarantine, where they can’t serve as an example for others. And that’s a shame, because Homo puppy’s secret superpower is that we’re so great at copying one another.
Don’t get me wrong: inspiring others is not about flaunting your deeds, and championing the good doesn’t mean blowing your own trumpet. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus cautioned his disciples against the one, while he encouraged the other: ‘You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works…’24
That doing good can be contagious was demonstrated by two American psychologists with a brilliant experiment in 2010.25 They set up a game for stakes in which 120 volunteers, all strangers to each other, were split up into four-player groups. Each person got some cash to start off with and then was free to choose if and how much to con
tribute to the group kitty. After the first round all the groups were shuffled so that no two people were ever in the same one twice.
What happened next was a veritable multiplying money trick. Whenever someone contributed an additional dollar to the kitty in the first round, other players in the group contributed on average twenty cents more in the next round, even though they were playing with different people. This effect persisted into the third round, where players contributed an average of five cents more. In the final tally, every contribution of one dollar was more than doubled.
I think back to this study often because this is something I want to keep in mind. Every good deed is like a pebble in a pond, sending ripples out in all directions. ‘We don’t typically see how our generosity cascades through the social network,’ noted one of the researchers, ‘to affect the lives of dozens or maybe hundreds of other people.’26
Kindness is catching. And it’s so contagious that it even infects people who merely see it from afar. Among the first psychologists to study this effect was Jonathan Haidt, in the late 1990s.27 In one of his articles he tells the story of a student who helped an old lady shovel snow from her driveway. One of his friends, seeing this selfless act, later wrote: ‘I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy. I felt like singing and running, or skipping and laughing. Just being active. I felt like saying nice things about people. Writing a beautiful poem or love song. Playing in the snow like a child. Telling everybody about his deed.’28
Haidt discovered that people are often surprised and moved by simple acts of generosity. When the psychologist asked his research subjects how this kind of experience affected them, they described an irresistible urge to go out and help someone, too.
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