A BOTTOM-UP VIEW OF EMPATHY
The above examples help explain why to the biologist, a Russian doll is such a satisfying plaything, especially if it has a historical dimension. I own a doll of Russian president Vladimir Putin, within whom we discover Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Kruschev, Stalin, and Lenin, in that order. Finding a little Lenin and Stalin within Putin will hardly surprise most political analysts. The same is true for biological traits: the old always remains present in the new.
This is relevant to the debate about the origins of empathy, especially because of the tendency in some disciplines, such as psychology, to put human capacities on a pedestal. They essentially adopt a top-down approach that emphasizes the uniqueness of human language, consciousness, and cognition. But instead of trying to place empathy in the upper regions of human cognition, it is probably best to start out examining the simplest possible processes, some perhaps even at the cellular level. In fact, recent neuroscience research suggests that very basic processes do underlie empathy. Researchers at the University of Parma, in Italy, were the first to report that monkeys have special brain cells that become active not only if the monkey grasps an object with its hand but also if it merely watches another do the same. Since these cells are activated as much by doing as by seeing someone else do, they are known as mirror neurons, or “monkey see, monkey do” neurons.
It seems that developmentally and evolutionarily, advanced forms of empathy are preceded by and grow out of more elementary ones. Biologists prefer such bottom-up accounts. They always assume continuity between past and present, child and adult, human and animal, even between humans and the most primitive mammals.
So, how and why would this trait have evolved in humans and other species? Empathy probably evolved in the context of the parental care that characterizes all mammals. Signaling their state through smiling and crying, human infants urge their caregiver to take action. This also applies to other primates. The survival value of these interactions is evident from the case of a deaf female chimpanzee I have known named Krom, who gave birth to a succession of infants and had intense positive interest in them. But because she was deaf, she wouldn’t even notice her babies’ calls of distress if she sat down on them. Krom’s case illustrates that without the proper mechanism for understanding and responding to a child’s needs, a species will not survive.
During the 180 million years of mammalian evolution, females who responded to their offspring’s needs out-reproduced those who were cold and distant. Having descended from a long line of mothers who nursed, fed, cleaned, carried, comforted, and defended their young, we should not be surprised by gender differences in human empathy, such as those proposed to explain the disproportionate rate of boys affected by autism, which is marked by a lack of social communication skills.
Empathy also plays a role in cooperation. One needs to pay close attention to the activities and goals of others to cooperate effectively. A lioness needs to notice quickly when other lionesses go into hunting mode, so that she can join them and contribute to the pride’s success. A male chimpanzee needs to pay attention to his buddy’s rivalries and skirmishes with others so that he can help out whenever needed, thus ensuring the political success of their partnership. Effective cooperation requires being exquisitely in tune with the emotional states and goals of others.
Within a bottom-up framework, the focus is not so much on the highest levels of empathy, but rather on its simplest forms and how these combine with increased cognition to produce more complex forms of empathy. How did this transformation take place? The evolution of empathy runs from shared emotions and intentions between individuals to a greater self/other distinction—that is, an “unblurring” of the lines between individuals. As a result, one’s own experience is distinguished from that of another person, even though at the same time we are vicariously affected by the other’s. This process culminates in a cognitive appraisal of the other’s behavior and situation: we adopt the other’s perspective.
As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life or that is culturally constructed. At heart, it is a hardwired response that we fine-tune and elaborate on in the course of our lives, until it reaches a level at which it becomes such a complex response that it is hard to recognize its origin in simpler responses, such as body mimicry and emotional contagion.
ON A LEASH
Biology holds us “on a leash,” in the felicitous words of biologist Edward Wilson, and will let us stray only so far from who we are. We can design our life any way we want, but whether we will thrive depends on how well that life fits human predispositions.
I hesitate to predict what we humans can and can’t do, but we must consider our biological leash when deciding what kind of society we want to build, especially when it comes to goals like achieving universal human rights.
If we could manage to see people on other continents as part of us, drawing them into our circle of reciprocity and empathy, we would be building on, rather than going against, our nature.
For instance, in 2004, the Israeli minister of justice caused political uproar for sympathizing with the enemy. Yosef Lapid questioned the Israeli army’s plans to demolish thousands of Palestinian homes in a zone along the Egyptian border. He had been touched by images on the evening news. “When I saw a picture on the TV of an old woman on all fours in the ruins of her home looking under some floor tiles for her medicines, I did think, ‘What would I say if it were my grandmother?’” he said. Lapid’s grandmother was a Holocaust victim.
This incident shows how a simple emotion can widen the definition of one’s group. Lapid had suddenly realized that Palestinians were part of his circle of concern, too. Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire that can rid us of the curse of xenophobia.
Empathy is fragile, though. Among our close animal relatives, it is switched on by events within their community, such as a youngster in distress, but it is just as easily switched off with regard to outsiders or members of other species, such as prey. The way a chimpanzee bashes in the skull of a live monkey by hitting it against a tree trunk is no advertisement for ape empathy. Bonobos are less brutal, but in their case, too, empathy needs to pass through several filters before it will be expressed. Often, the filters prevent expressions of empathy because no ape can afford feeling pity for all living things all the time. This applies equally to humans. Our evolutionary background makes it hard to identify with outsiders. We’ve evolved to hate our enemies, to ignore people we barely know, and to distrust anybody who doesn’t look like us. Even if we are largely cooperative within our communities, we become almost a different animal in our treatment of strangers.
This is the challenge of our time: globalization by a tribal species. In trying to structure the world such that it suits human nature, the point to keep in mind is that political ideologues by definition hold narrow views. They are blind to what they don’t wish to see. The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we are not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people kill each other, we call them “animals.” But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being “humane.” We like to claim the latter tendency for ourselves. Yet, it will be hard to come up with anything we like about ourselves that is not part of our evolutionary background. What we need, therefore, is a vision of human nature that encompasses all of our tendencies: the good, the bad, and the ugly.