The Age of Empathy (34 page)

It’s possible, then, that male sensitivity to others is conditional, aroused mostly by family and friends. For those who don’t belong to the inner circle, and especially those who act like rivals, the portal remains closed and the empathy switch turned off. Neuroscience supports this idea for humans. A German investigator, Tania Singer, tested men and women in a brain scanner while they could see another in pain. Both sexes commiserated with the other: The pain areas in their
own brains lit up when they saw the other’s hand getting mildly shocked. It was as if they felt the sting themselves. But this happened only if the partner was someone likable and with whom they had played a friendly game. Things changed drastically if the partner had played unfairly in the previous game. Now the subjects felt cheated, and seeing the other in pain had less of an effect. Women still showed some empathy, but the men had nothing left. On the contrary, if men saw the unfair player getting shocked, their brain’s pleasure centers lit up. They had moved from empathy to justice, and seemed to enjoy the other’s punishment. Perhaps there exists a Tertullian heaven after all, at least for men, where they watch their enemies roast in flames.

Nevertheless, men seem unable to turn their empathy switch completely down to zero. One of the most illuminating books I have read in recent years is
On Killing,
by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, who served in the U.S. Army. Grossman follows in the footsteps of Leo Tolstoy, who gave us
War and Peace
and said that he was more interested in how and why soldiers kill, and what they feel while doing so, than in how generals arrange their armies on the battlefield. To actually kill someone is, of course, quite different from watching a movie about it, and in this regard the data tell us something few would have suspected: Most men lack a killer instinct.

It is a curious fact that the majority of soldiers, although well armed, never kill. During World War II, only one out of every five U.S. soldiers actually fired at the enemy. The other four were plenty courageous, braving grave danger, landing on the beaches, rescuing comrades under fire, fetching ammunition for others, and so on, yet they failed to fire their weapons. One officer reported that “squad leaders and platoon sergeants had to move up and down the firing line kicking men to get them to fire. We felt like we were doing good to get two or three men out of a squad to fire.” Similarly, it has been calculated that during the Vietnam War, U.S. soldiers fired more than fifty thousand bullets for every enemy soldier killed. Most bullets must have been fired into the air.

This recalls the famous Stanley Milgram experiment in which
human subjects were asked to deliver high-voltage shocks to others. They obeyed the experimenter to a surprising degree, but began to cheat as soon as he was called away. Subjects still acted as if they were giving shocks, but were now feigning punishment by administering much milder ones. Grossman himself draws a comparison with New Guinean tribes where the men are excellent shots with bow and arrow during the hunt, but when they go to war they remove the feathers from their arrows, thus rendering them useless. They prefer to fight with inaccurate weapons, knowing that their enemies will have taken the same step.

Killing or hurting others is something we find so horrendous that wars are often a collective conspiracy to miss, an artifice of incompetence, a game of posturing rather than an actual hostile confrontation. Nowadays, this is not always realized, given that wars can be fought at a distance almost like a computer game, which eliminates most of these natural inhibitions. But actual killing at close range has no glory, no pleasure, and is something the typical soldier tries to avoid at all cost. Only a small percentage of men—perhaps 1 or 2 percent—does the vast majority of killing during a war. This may be the same category of humans discussed before, the one immune to the suffering of others. Most soldiers report a deep revulsion: They vomit at the sight of dead enemies, and end up with haunting memories. Lifelong combat trauma was already known to the ancient Greeks, as reflected in Sophocles’ plays about the “divine madness” that we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Decades after a war, veterans still can’t hold back tears when asked about the killings they have witnessed. The sorrow and repulsion associated with these images is triggered by our species’ natural body language, similar to the scream that Rowling couldn’t get out of her head. This is also what makes it so hard to apply lethal force at close range: “The average soldier has an intense resistance to bayoneting his fellow man, and this act is surpassed only by the resistance to
being
bayoneted.”

So, anyone who would like to use war atrocities as an argument against human empathy needs to think twice. The two aren’t mutually
exclusive, and it’s important to consider how hard most men find it to pull the trigger. Why would this be, if not for empathy with their fellow human beings? Warfare is psychologically complex, and seems more a product of hierarchy and following orders than of aggression and lack of mercy. We are definitely capable of it, and do kill for our country, but the activity conflicts at the deepest level with our humanity. Even “scorched earth” Union General William Sherman had nothing good to say about it:

One of the first debates about the role of empathy in human life reached us more than two millennia ago from a Chinese sage, Mencius, a follower of Confucius. Mencius saw empathy as part of human nature, famously stating that everyone is born with a mind that cannot bear to see the suffering of others.

In one of Mencius’s stories, the king watches an ox being led past his palace. The king wants to know what’s going on, and is told that the ox is on its way to being slaughtered so that its blood may be used for a ceremony. The king can’t stand the ox’s frightened appearance, however, which to him suggests that it realizes what is about to happen. He orders that the ox be saved. But not wanting to cancel the ceremony, he proposes to sacrifice a sheep instead.

Mencius is unimpressed by the king’s pity for the ox, telling him that he seems as much concerned with his own tender feelings as the animal’s fate:

We care more about what we see firsthand than about what remains out of sight. We’re certainly capable of feeling for others based on hearing, reading, or thinking about them, but concern based purely on the imagination lacks strength and urgency. Hearing the news that a good friend has fallen ill and is suffering in a hospital, we’ll sympathize. But our worries intensify tenfold when we actually stand at his bedside and notice how pale he looks, or how much trouble he has breathing.

Mencius made us reflect on the origin of empathy, and how much it owes to bodily connections. These connections also explain the trouble we have empathizing with outsiders. Empathy builds on proximity, similarity, and familiarity, which is entirely logical given that it evolved to promote in-group cooperation. Combined with our interest in social harmony, which requires a fair distribution of resources, empathy put the human species on a path toward small-scale societies that stress equality and solidarity. Nowadays, most of us live in much larger societies, where this emphasis is harder to maintain, but we still have a psychology that feels most comfortable with these outcomes.

A society based purely on selfish motives and market forces may produce wealth, yet it can’t produce the unity and mutual trust that make life worthwhile. This is why surveys measure the greatest happiness not in the wealthiest nations but rather in those with the highest levels of trust among citizens. Conversely, the trust-starved climate of modern business spells trouble and has recently made many people deeply unhappy by wiping out their savings. In 2008, the world’s financial system collapsed under the weight of predatory lending, reporting of nonexisting profits, pyramid schemes, and reckless betting with other people’s money. One of the system’s architects, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, said that he had no idea
this might happen. In response to a grilling by a U.S. House committee, he acknowledged that his vision had been flawed: “That is precisely the reason I was shocked because I’d been going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

The mistake of Greenspan and other supply-side economists was to assume that, even though the free market by itself is no moral enterprise, it would steer society toward a state in which everyone’s interests were optimally served. Hadn’t their demigod, Milton Friedman, declared that social responsibility conflicts with freedom? And hadn’t an even higher authority, Adam Smith, given them the metaphor of the “invisible hand,” according to which even the most selfish motives will automatically advance the greater good? The free market knows what is best for us. The baker needs income, his clients need bread, and voilà, both parties stand to gain from their transaction. Morality has nothing to do with it.

Unfortunately, these references to Smith are selective. They leave out an essential part of his thinking, which is far more congenial to the position I have taken throughout this book; namely, that reliance on greed as the driving force of society is bound to undermine its very fabric. Smith saw society as a huge machine, the wheels of which are polished by virtue, whereas vice causes them to grate. The machine just won’t run smoothly without a strong community sense in every citizen. Smith frequently mentioned honesty, morality, sympathy, and justice, seeing them as essential companions to the invisible hand of the market.

In effect, society depends on a second invisible hand, one that reaches out to others. The feeling that one human being cannot be indifferent to another if we wish to build a community true to the meaning of the word is the other force that underlies our dealings with one another. The evolutionary antiquity of this force makes it all the more surprising just how often it is being ignored. Do business schools teach ethics and obligations to the community in any context other than how it may advance business? Do they pay equal attention
to stakeholders and shareholders? And why does the “dismal science” attract so few female students, and has never produced a female Nobelist? Could it be that women feel no connection to the caricature of a rational being whose only goal in life is to maximize profit? Where are human relations in all of this?

It’s not as if we’re asking our species to do anything foreign to it by building on the old herd instinct that has kept animal societies together for millions of years. And here I don’t mean that we should blindly follow one another, but that we have to stick together: We can’t just scatter in all directions. Every individual is connected to something larger than itself. Those who like to depict this connection as contrived, as not part of human biology, don’t have the latest behavioral and neurological data on their side. The connection is deeply felt and, as Mandeville had to admit, no society can do without it.

First of all, there are the occasions where others need aid and we have a chance to offer it in the form of food banks, disaster relief, elderly care, summer camps for poor children, and so on. Measured by volunteer community services, Western societies seem to be in great shape indeed, and have plenty of compassion to go around. But the second area where solidarity counts is the common good, which includes health care, education, infrastructure, transportation, national defense, protection against nature, and so on. Here the role of empathy is more indirect, because no one would want to see such vital pillars of society depend purely on the warm glow of kindness.

The firmest support for the common good comes from enlightened self-interest: the realization that we’re all better off if we work together. If we don’t benefit from our contributions now, then at least potentially we will in the future, and if not personally, then at least via improved conditions around us. Since empathy binds individuals together and gives each a stake in the welfare of others, it bridges the world of direct “what’s in it for me?” benefits and collective benefits, which take a bit more reflection to grasp. Empathy has the power to open our eyes to the latter by attaching emotional value to them. Let me give two concrete examples.

When Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in 2005, our television screens showed massive human despair. The disaster was exacerbated by the gross incompetence of agencies that were supposed to deal with its aftermath and by the cold detachment of politicians at the highest levels. The rest of the nation watched with a mixture of horror, pity, and worry. The worry was not without self-interest, because obviously the way one mammoth disaster is being handled tells us something about how others may be handled in the future, including ones that hit us. The lackluster official response had a twofold impact: amazing generosity from the public, and a shift in perception about governmental responsibility. Until Katrina, the nation’s leadership had gotten away with its everyone-for-himself philosophy, but the catastrophe raised serious doubts about it. As Barack Obama said three years later, “We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty; that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes.”

Another example of how empathy figures into public policy debates concerns abolitionism. Again, the impetus came not just from imagining how bad slavery was, but from firsthand observation of its cruelty. Abraham Lincoln was plagued by negative feelings, as he explained in a letter to a slave-owning friend in Kentucky: