The Age of Empathy (35 page)

In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip, on a Steam Boat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio, there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continued torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border. [It is] a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable.

ix
Barack Obama
: 2006 Commencement Address at Northwestern University, Northwestern News Service, June 22, 2006.

1
“What is government”
: Federalist Paper No. 51 (Rossiter, 1961, p. 322).

2
“How selfish soever”
: Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759, p. 9).

5
“failure of citizenship”
: Newt Gingrich, address to the Conservative Political Action Conference, March 2, 2007: “How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn’t get out of the way of a hurricane”?

8
“Any animal whatever”
: Charles Darwin (1871, pp. 71—72).

9
It’s the bedrock
: An argument worked out in full in
Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
(de Waal, 2006).

12
father of behaviorism
: John B. Watson (1878—1958) and B. F. Skinner (1904—90), both interested in animal behavior and its connection to human behavior, founded the influential school of behaviorism.

13
Watson’s crusade
: For Watson’s views, which were hardly atypical for
his day, and the figure of Harry Harlow, see Deborah Blum’s (2002) illuminating
Love at Goon Park.

17
known as the San
: Even though the “Bushmen” label may seem politically incorrect, it is used to denote both Bushmen and Bushwomen. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (2006, p. 47) explains that this is how this population now calls itself. The label “San” used by anthropologists is apparently a derogatory term derived from the Nama word for “bandits.”

18
stay off the ground
: Less than two million years ago
Homo erectus
still had arboreal adaptations that suggest sleeping in trees for safety (Lordkipanidze et al., 2007).

18
When they cross a human dirt road
: Kimberley Hockings and co-workers (2006) documented road crossings by wild chimpanzees surrounded by human populations.

21
reveries of centuries past
: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who famously said, “Man was born free,” explained that “man’s first law is to watch over his own preservation; his first care he owes to himself; and as soon as he reaches the age of reason, he becomes the only judge of the best means to preserve himself; he becomes his own master” (
The Social Contract,
1762, pp. 49—50). Rousseau painted the image of our ancestors asleep under a fruit tree in the jungle: their bellies full, their minds clear of worries. How much of an illusion such a carefree existence is may not have occurred to Rousseau, who bore five children with his live-in maid but dispatched every one of them to an orphanage.

22
“The story of the human race”
: Winston Churchill (1932).

23
walls of Jericho
: Israeli archeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef (1986) studied the walls of Jericho, noting that the city had no known enemies, that accumulation of debris had made the walls scalable (which should have been prevented if they served military purposes), and that Jericho happens to sit on a sloping plain next to a drainage basin, and hence probably was subject to massive mudflows.

23
scattered small bands
: A study of mitochondrial DNA suggests near extinction of our species, with total numbers of around two thousand, before the population came back from the brink (Behar et al., 2008). “Tiny bands of early humans developed in isolation from each other for as much as half of our entire history as a species,” according to Doron Behar, a genographer in Haifa, Israel (
Breitbart.com
, April 25, 2008).

23
stretches of peace and harmony
: Douglas Fry (2006) reviews the anthropological literature on warfare, defined as armed combat between political entities, and challenges the “war assumption” of Winston Churchill and others. Whereas archeological evidence for homicide is abundant (and homicide is common in present-day hunter-gatherers, such as the Bushmen), solid evidence for warfare goes back at most fifteen thousand years. See also John Horgan’s “Has Science Found a Way to End All Wars?”
(Discover,
March 2008).

23
Comparisons with apes
: Bonobos and chimpanzees are our closest primate relatives, with whom we share a common ancestor estimated to have lived 5 or 6 million years ago. Also known as the “make love—not war” primates, bonobos have a reputation for being exceptionally peaceful (de Waal, 1997). Observations of sexual “mingling” at territorial boundaries were first made by Japanese scientists, led by Takayoshi Kano, who devoted his life to fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Kano, 1992). Not a single fatal attack among bonobos, captive or wild, has ever been witnessed, whereas dozens of such attacks have been documented in chimpanzees (e.g., de Waal, 1986; Wrangham and Peterson, 1996). Recent observations of bonobos hunting and killing monkeys have been interpreted as being at odds with this pacific image, but predation is not the same as fighting. Predation is motivated by hunger rather than aggression, and relies on different brain circuits, which explains why herbivores can be quite aggressive. Further see de Waal’s “Bonobos, Left & Right” in
eSkeptic
(August 8, 2007).

24
the average Bushman
: Polly Wiessner (personal communication). For more on how primitive warfare is constrained by ties between communities, see Lars Rodseth and co-workers (1991) and Wiessner (2001).

25
“It is bad to die”
: Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (2006, p. 213).

27
“Manchester Newspaper”
: Charles Darwin complained in a letter to an eminent geologist about a commentary on Napoleon’s exploits in
The Manchester Guardian,
titled “National and Individual Rapacity Vindicated by the Law of Nature” (Letter #2782, May 4, 1860,
www.darwinproject.ac.uk
).

28
“believe in evolution”
: Debate among Republican presidential candidates at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California (May 3, 2007).

28
“the whole effort of nature”
: Herbert Spencer (1864, p. 414).

28
Andrew Carnegie
: Andrew Carnegie (1889) on the law of competition: “While the law may sometimes be hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.”

28
John D. Rockefeller
: Quoted in Richard Hofstadter’s
Social Darwinism in American Thought
(1944, p. 45).

28
This religious angle
: On the issue of compassion (or lack thereof) in American society, see Candace Clark’s
Misery and Company
(1997). About one-third of the U.S. population believes that the rich owe nothing to the poor (Pew Research Center, 2004). The Bible couldn’t be clearer, though, urging us to act as “a defense for the helpless, a defense for the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shade from the heat” (Isaiah 25:4). Fortunately, many religious groups are more faithful to the values of the Bible than to those of Social Darwinism, such as when they run soup kitchens in inner cities or provide massive assistance to victims of natural disasters.

30
This is why I’m tired
: Not only do Social Darwinists erroneously equate their ideology with evolutionary theory, the opponents of Social Darwinism also don’t think twice about blaming evolutionary theory. This confusion remains alive today, as evident from this statement by Ben Stein, an American actor: “Darwinism, perhaps mixed with Imperialism, gave us Social Darwinism, a form of racism so vicious that it countenanced the Holocaust against the Jews and mass murder of many other groups in the name of speeding along the evolutionary process” (
www.expelledthemovie.com
, October 31, 2007).

31
novelty seekers
: On Americans as a self-selected people with a certain personality type, see Peter Whybrow’s
American Mania
(2005).

32
“In Europe we habitually”
: Alexis de Tocqueville
(Democracy in America,
1835, p. 284).

32
Ayn Rand
: In a typical passage of Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged
(1957, p. 1059), the novel’s main character, John Galt, claims: “Accept the fact that achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that
happiness
… is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.”

36
monkey society was falling apart
: Jessica Flack and co-workers (2005).

37
“What’s wrong with America”
: Steve Skvara, sixty years old, was one of millions of Americans who over the past decade lost their health insurance or were bankrupted by health-care costs. He became an instant celebrity with his heartfelt question at the AFL-CIO Presidential Candidates Forum in Chicago (August 7, 2007).

37
quality of the health care
: The United States pays more for health care per capita than any other nation, yet receives less in return. In terms of overall quality, U.S. health care ranks thirty-seventh in the world (World Health Organization: 2007), and on the most critical health index—average life expectancy—the United States ranks only forty-second (National Center for Health Statistics: 2004). See also Sharon Begley, “The Myth of ‘Best in the World’”
(Newsweek,
March 31, 2008).

38
Milton Friedman
: From “Capitalism and Freedom” (1962, p. 133).

38
the Enron’s Corporation’s sixty-four page
: Michael Miller in
Business First of Columbus
(March 29, 2002).

39
Jeff Skilling
: Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind in
Smartest Guys in the Room
(2003).

39
Genes can’t be any more “selfish”
: Philosopher Mary Midgley (1979) acidly compared Dawkins’s warnings against his own metaphor to the paternosters of Mafiosi. I myself (de Waal, 1996) have protested overextension of the metaphor, such as in Dawkins’s claim: “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish,” which equates the selfishness of genes with psychological selfishness. It was good to see this particular sentence retracted in the 30th Anniversary Edition of
The Selfish Gene
(2006, p. ix).

40
the epic drought in Georgia
: Governor Sonny Perdue held a prayer vigil in Atlanta on November 13, 2007.

40
our shared academic background
: We are both ethologists—that is, zoologists trained in the study of animal behavior. Dawkins is, moreover, a student of the Dutch father of ethology, Niko Tinbergen, who moved to Oxford in 1947. Tinbergen was a product of the same traditions that shaped my teachers in the Netherlands.

40
two-level approach
: Biologists distinguish between (1) the reason why a behavior evolved in a species over millions of years, and (2) how individuals produce the behavior in the here and now. We call the first the
ultimate
reason for a behavior’s existence, and the second the
proximate
process that produces it (Mayr, 1961; Tinbergen, 1963). The proximate/ultimate distinction is considered one of the toughest in
evolutionary thought, and it is undoubtedly the most violated one. Biologists often focus on the ultimate level at the expense of the proximate one, whereas psychologists do the opposite. Being a biologist with psychological interests, I pursue a proximate perspective (focused on emotion, motivation, and cognition) informed by an evolutionary framework. The idea behind “motivational autonomy” is that motivations behind a behavior are unconstrained by the ultimate reasons for its existence. Even if a behavior evolved for self-serving reasons, these reasons do not need to be part of the actor’s motivation any more than that a spider needs to be intent on catching flies while weaving her web.

42
biologists call such applications a mistake
: In his television documentary, Richard Dawkins struggled with the same issue, speaking of “misfiring selfish genes.” He meant that human kindness is applied under a wider range of circumstances than what it originally evolved for, which is another way of saying that it enjoys motivational autonomy. As Matt Ridley (1996, p. 249) put it in
The Origins of Virtue,
“Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.”

42
jumps on the train tracks
: The evidence for costly altruism in animals is largely anecdotal, but the same is true of our own species. All we can go by are occasional media accounts. Three typical examples:

• Wesley Autrey, a fifty-year-old construction worker, rescued a man who had fallen in front of an approaching New York subway train. Too late to pull him to safety, Mr. Autrey jumped between the tracks, pressed the other man down, and lay on top of him while five cars rolled overhead. Afterward, he downplayed his heroism: “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular” (
  New York Times,
  January 3, 2007).
  

• In Roseville, California, a black Labrador, named Jet, jumped in front of his friend, six-year-old Kevin Haskell, who was being threatened by a rattlesnake. The dog took the serpent’s venom. The boy’s family spent four thousand dollars on blood transfusions and veterinary bills to save their pet (KCRA, April 6, 2004). For other costly altruism by a dog, watch the remarkable footage of one who drags an injured companion off a busy Chilean highway:
  www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgjyhKN_35g
  .
  

• Off the coast of New Zealand’s North Island, Rob Howes and three other swimmers were herded and protected by dolphins. The dolphins swam tight circles around them, driving them together. When Howes tried to swim free, the two largest dolphins herded him back just as he spotted an approaching nine-foot great white shark. The swimmers remained encircled for forty minutes before the dolphins let them go (New Zealand Press Association, November 22, 2004).