In Humanity, historian Jonathan Glover documents many such “sympathy breakthroughs” in the wars of the twentieth century—in Stalin’s purges, the My Lai massacre, the killing fields in Cambodia, the genocide in Rwanda. These are moments when soldiers break free from the dutiful honoring of the military code, from strict orders to shoot on sight, and are overwhelmed by the humanity of the humans they are killing. Most often it is when encountering children and women—for example, the toddlers and pregnant women beheaded and disemboweled in the My Lai massacre. Most often the sympathy breakthroughs are triggered by eye-to-eye contact, the sight of the enemy’s pupils, the pores on his skin, oblique movements in his eyebrows.
No sympathy breakthrough was more dramatic than that of Miklós Nyiszli, a medical doctor at a Nazi concentration camp. One day as a gas chamber was being cleared of bodies, a young girl of sixteen was found alive at the bottom of the rigor mortis pile of thin-limbed, stiffening corpses. The attending staff reflexively offered the young girl an old coat, warm broth, tea, and reassuring touch to her shoulders and back. Nyiszli tried to persuade the concentration camp’s commandant to save her. One proposal was to hide her amid German women working at the camp. The commandant toyed with this possibility momentarily but in the end had her killed by his method of choice—the young girl was shot in the back of the neck.
Human history, Glover contends, can be thought of as a contest between cruelty and compassion, tellingly revealed in wartime sympathy breakthroughs, when the force of compassion overwhelms the edicts of war. You could make the same case about human nature. Fight/flight tendencies of self-preservation are continually at odds with tendencies to care in the electrochemical flow of our nervous systems. The content of the mind shifts between the press of self-interest and the push of compassion. The ebb and flow of marriages, families, friends, and workplaces track the dynamic tension between these two great forces—raw self-interest and a devotion to the welfare of the other. The study of emotion is experiencing its own “sympathy breakthrough” thanks to recent studies of compassion, which are revealing this caretaking emotion to be built into our nervous systems. The study of this emotion holds new clues about the health of marriages, families, and communities.
THE COMPASSION CONSPIRACY
As Charles Darwin developed his first account of the evolution of humans in the Descent of Man, he argued for “the greater strength of the social or maternal instincts than that of any other instinct or motive.” His reasoning was disarmingly intuitive: In those collectives of our hominid predecessors, communities of more sympathetic individuals were more successful in raising healthier offspring to the age of viability and reproduction—the surest route to getting genes to the next generation, the sine qua non of evolution.
Darwin’s elevation of sympathy as the strongest of our instincts, and as the foundation of ethical systems, has not attracted many adherents in the annals of Western thought. More typically, sympathy and compassion have been treated with dismissive skepticism or downright derision. Thomas Huxley argued that evolution did not produce a biologically based capacity to care; instead, kindness, cooperation, and compassion are cultural creations, constructed within religious commandments and rituals, in norms governing public exchange, codified in social organizations, as desperate attempts to rein in, to countervail man’s base tendencies. The regularity of parents abandoning and abusing children, infanticide, torture, and genocide lend compelling, if not overwhelming, credence to Huxley’s counterpoint. Scientists searching for an evolved, biological basis of compassion, by implication, would be grasping at the air, tilting their labs at windmills.
Other influential thinkers in the Western canon, reveals philosopher Martha Nussbaum in her brilliant history of the study of emotion in Upheavals of Thought, have gone further. The trend in Western thought has been to argue that compassion is an unreliable guide to ethical behavior (see quotations below). Compassion is “blind,” too subjective to be a universal guide to the conscience and ethical conduct. It is imbued with the individual’s idiosyncratic concerns (what’s unwarranted suffering in my eyes is justified in yours). Compassion is “weak” it enfeebles the individual in the hard work of meting out justice.
A feeling of sympathy is beautiful and amiable; for it shows a charitable interest in the lot of other men…. But this good-natured passion is nevertheless weak and always blind.
IMMANUEL KANT, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
AYN RAND, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World”
A transvaluation of values, under the new pressure and hammer of which a conscience should be steeled and a heart transformed into brass, as to bear the weight of such a responsibility.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil, section 203
Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.
MACHIAVELLI
These old notions have blinded the scientific study of compassion. New empirical studies, though, have mushroomed, and yet again give the nod to Darwin. Compassion is a biologically based emotion rooted deep in the mammalian brain, and shaped by perhaps the most potent of selection pressures humans evolved to adapt to—the need to care for the vulnerable. Compassion is anything but blind; it is finely attuned to vulnerability. It is anything but weak; it fosters courageous, altruistic action often at significant cost to the self. These discoveries would be founded upon the study of a region of the nervous system that has remained mysterious to scientific understanding until recently.
LOST VAGUS
In calling sympathy the strongest of instincts, Darwin was touching a nerve in the veins of canonical Western thought. Little did he know, Darwin was also touching another nerve, literally a bundle of nerves, known as the vagus nerve, which resides in the chest and, when activated, produces a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat. The vagus nerve originates in the top of the spinal cord and then winds its way through the body (vagus is Latin for wandering), connecting up to facial muscle tissue, muscles that are involved in vocalization, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys and liver, and the digestive organs. In a series of controversial papers, physiological psychologist Steve Porges has made the case that the vagus nerve is the nerve of compassion, the body’s caretaking organ.
How so? First of all, Porges notes that the vagus nerve innervates the muscle groups of communicative systems involved in caretaking—the facial musculature and the vocal apparatus. In our research, for example, we have found that people systematically sigh—little quarter-second, breathy expressions of concern and understanding—when listening to another person describe an experience of suffering. The sigh is a primordial exhalation, calming the sigher’s fight/flight physiology, and a trigger of comfort and trust, our study found, in the speaker. When we sigh in soothing fashion, or reassure others in distress with our concerned gaze or oblique eyebrows, the vagus nerve is doing its work, stimulating the muscles of the throat, mouth, face, and tongue to emit soothing displays of concern and reassurance.