The Age of Empathy

by Frans de Waal

  In fact, American society is entering a period of correction, given the collapse of its financial system and the dimensions of its healthcare crisis. Reliance on the profit principle has proven disastrous, so that the United States now ranks dead last in the industrialized world in terms of the quality of the health care that it provides. Western Europe, on the other hand, has enviable health care but it is, for other reasons and in other areas, moving in the opposite direction. When citizens are pampered by the state, they lose interest in economic advancement. They become passive players more interested in taking than in giving. Some nations have already turned back the clock on the welfare state, and others are expected to follow.

  Every society needs to strike a balance between selfish and social motives to ensure that its economy serves society rather than the other way around. Economists often ignore this dynamic, thinking only in terms of money. Celebrated economist Milton Friedman claimed that “few trends could so very undermine the foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.” Friedman thus offered an ideology that puts people last.

  Even if Friedman were right in theory about the connection between money and freedom, in practice money corrupts. All too often it leads to exploitation, injustice, and rampant dishonesty. Given its colossal fraud, the Enron Corporation’s sixty-four-page “Code of Ethics” now seems as fictional as the safety manual of the Titanic. In the past decade, every advanced nation has had major business scandals, and in every case executives have managed to shake the foundations of their society precisely by following Friedman’s advice.

  Enron and the Selfish Gene

  Outside a hip restaurant I finally met my celebrity. My friends had promised that this place was frequented by Hollywood stars, and indeed when darkness fell in the middle of dinner, and we spilled out onto the street, I found myself next to a cigarette-smoking movie idol whom I chatted with about this and that, and how our food must be getting cold. The encounter took place thanks to one of those rolling blackouts that struck California in 2000. Fifteen minutes later everyone was back at their table, back to normal, but of course what had just happened was extraordinary.

  No, I don’t mean meeting the star, but witnessing the wonders of unrestrained capitalism, all thanks to Enron, the Texas-based energy company that had developed innovative ways of tweaking the market and creating artificial power shortages so that prices would soar. Never mind that the blackouts posed serious risks for people on respirators or in elevators. Social responsibility just wasn’t part of Enron’s mindset. They played by Friedman’s rules but were inspired by an unexpected additional source that came straight out of the world of biology. The company’s CEO, Jeff Skilling—now in prison—was a great fan of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, and deliberately tried to mimic nature by instigating cutthroat competition within his company.

  Skilling set up a peer review committee known as “Rank & Yank.” It ranked employees on a 1—5 scale of representing the best (1) or worst (5), and gave the boot to everyone ranked 5. Up to 20 percent of the employees were axed every year, but not without having been humiliated on a website featuring their portraits. They were first sent to “Siberia”—meaning that they had two weeks to find another position within the company. If they didn’t, they were shown the door. The thinking behind Skilling’s committee was that the human species has only two fundamental drives: greed and fear. This obviously turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. People were perfectly willing to slit others’ throats to survive within Enron’s environment, resulting in a corporate atmosphere marked by appalling dishonesty within and ruthless exploitation outside the company. It eventually led to Enron’s implosion in 2001.

  The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want, from tolerance to intolerance, and from altruism to greed. It’s good to realize, though, that if biologists never stop talking of competition, this doesn’t mean they advocate it, and if they call genes selfish, this doesn’t mean that genes actually are. Genes can’t be any more “selfish” than a river can be “angry,” or sun rays “loving.” Genes are little chunks of DNA. At most, they are “self-promoting,” because successful genes help their carriers spread more copies of themselves.

  Like many before him, Skilling had fallen hook, line, and sinker for the selfish-gene metaphor, thinking that if our genes are selfish then we must be selfish, too. This is not necessarily what Dawkins meant, though, as became clear again during an actual debate that we had in a tower overlooking my chimpanzees.

  As brief background, one needs to know that Dawkins and I had been critical of each other in print. He had said that I was taking poetic license with regard to animal kindness while I had chided him for coining a metaphor prone to be misunderstood. The usual academic bickering, perhaps, but serious enough that I feared some frost during our encounter at the Yerkes field station. Dawkins visited in connection with the production of a TV series, The Genius of Charles Darwin. The producers arrived ahead of him to set up a “spontaneous” encounter in which Dawkins would drive up to the door, step out of his van, walk toward me, shake my hand, and warmly greet me before we’d walk off together to see the primates. We did all of this as if it were the first time—even though we’d met before. To break the ice, I told him about the epic drought in Georgia, and how our governor had just led a prayer vigil on the steps of the state capitol to make sure we’d get some rain. This cheered up the staunch atheist, and we laughed at the marvelous coincidence that the vigil had been planned as soon as the weatherman had announced rain.

  Our tower debate was frosty indeed, but only because it was one of those unusually chilly days in Georgia. With Dawkins unselfishly tossing fruits at the apes below, we quickly settled on common ground, which wasn’t too hard given our shared academic background. I have no problems calling genes “selfish” so long as it’s understood that this says nothing about the actual motives of humans or animals, and Dawkins agreed that all sorts of behavior, including acts of genuine kindness, may be produced by genes selected to benefit their carriers. In short, we agreed on a separation between what drives evolution and what drives actual behavior that is about as well recognized in biology as is the separation of church and state outside Georgia.

  Overall, we had a splendid chat, as the Brits say, trying to flesh out this two-level approach. Before applying it here to kindness or altruism, let me start with a simpler example: color vision. Seeing colors is thought to have come about because our primate ancestors needed to tell ripe and unripe fruits apart. But once we could see color, the capacity became available for all sorts of other purposes. We use it to read maps, notice someone’s blushing, or find shoes that match our blouse. This has little to do with fruits, although colors indicating ripeness—red or yellow—still get us excited and are therefore prominent in traffic lights, advertisements, and works of art. On the other hand, nature’s default color—green—is considered calming, restful, and boring.

  The animal kingdom is full of traits that evolved for one reason but are also used for others. The hoofs of ungulates are adapted to run on hard surfaces, but also deliver a mean kick to pursuers. The hands of primates evolved to grasp branches, but also help infants cling to their mothers. The mouths of fish are made for feeding, but also serve as “holding pens” for the fry of mouth-breeding cichlids. When it comes to behavior, too, the original function doesn’t always tell us how and why a behavior will be used in daily life. Behavior enjoys motivational autonomy.

  A good example is sex. Even though our genital anatomy and sexual urges evolved for reproduction, most of us engage in sex without paying attention to its long-term consequences. I’ve always thought that the main impetus for sex must be pleasure, but in a recent poll by American psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss people offered a bewildering array of reasons, from “I wanted to please my boyfriend” and “I needed a raise”
to “we had nothing to do” and “I was curious how she’d be in bed.” If humans usually engage in sex without giving reproduction a thought—which is why we have the morning-after pill—this holds even more for animals, which don’t know the connection between sex and reproduction. They have sex because they are attracted to one another, or because they have learned its pleasurable effects, but not because they want to reproduce. One can’t want something one doesn’t know about. This is what I mean by motivational autonomy: The sex drive is hardly concerned with the reason why sex exists in the first place.

  Or consider the adoption of young that aren’t one’s own. If the mother of a juvenile primate dies, other females often take care of it. Even adult males may carry an unrelated orphan around, protecting it and letting it remove food from their hands. Humans, too, adopt on a large scale, often going through hellish bureaucratic procedures to find a child to bestow care upon. The strangest cases, though, are cross-species adoptions, such as a canine bitch in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that became famous for having saved an abandoned baby boy by placing him alongside her own puppies in an act reminiscent of Romulus and Remus. This adoptive tendency is well-known at zoos, one of which had a Bengal tigress nurse piglets. The maternal instinct is remarkably generous.

  Some biologists call such applications a “mistake,” suggesting that behavior shouldn’t be used for anything it wasn’t intended for. Even if this sounds a bit like the Catholic Church telling us that sex isn’t for fun, I can see their point. Instead of nursing those piggies, the biologically optimal thing for the tigress would have been to use them as protein snacks. But as soon as we move from biology to psychology, the perspective changes. Mammals have been endowed with powerful impulses to take care of vulnerable young, so that the tigress is only doing what comes naturally to her. Psychologically speaking, she isn’t mistaken at all.

  Similarly, if a human couple adopts a child from a faraway land, their care and worries are as genuine as those of biological parents. Or if people have sex because they “want to change the conversation” (an actual reason given in the above poll), their arousal and enjoyment are as real as that of any other couple. Evolved tendencies are part and parcel of our psychology, and we’re free to use them any way we like.

  Now, let’s apply these insights to kindness. My main point is that even if a trait evolved for reason X, it may very well be used in daily life for reasons X, Y, and Z. Offering assistance to others evolved to serve self-interest, which it does if aimed at close relatives or group mates willing to return the favor. This is the way natural selection operates: It produces behavior that, on average and in the long run, benefits those showing it. But this doesn’t mean that humans or animals only help one another for selfish reasons. The reasons relevant for evolution don’t necessarily restrict the actor. The actor follows an existing tendency, sometimes doing so even if there’s absolutely nothing to be gained: the man who jumps on the train tracks to protect a stranger, the dog who suffers massive injuries by leaping between a child and a rattlesnake, or the dolphins forming a protective ring around human swimmers in shark-infested water. It’s hard to imagine that these actors are seeking future payoffs. Just as sex doesn’t need to aim at reproduction, and parental care doesn’t need to favor one’s own offspring, assistance given to others doesn’t require the actor to know if, when, and how he’ll get better from it.

  This is why the selfish-gene metaphor is so tricky. By injecting psychological terminology into a discussion of gene evolution, the two levels that biologists work so hard to keep apart are slammed together. Clouding of the distinction between genes and motivations has led to an exceptionally cynical view of human and animal behavior. Believe it or not, empathy is commonly presented as an illusion, something that not even humans truly possess. One of the most repeated quips in the sociobiological literature of the past three decades is “Scratch an ‘altruist,’ and watch a ‘hypocrite’ bleed.” With great zeal and shock effect, authors depict us as complete Scrooges. In The Moral Animal, Robert Wright claims that “the pretense of selflessness is about as much part of human nature as is its frequent absence.” The reigning incredulity concerning human kindness recalls a Monty Python sketch in which a banker is being asked for a small donation for the orphanage. Utterly mystified by the whole concept of a gift, the banker wonders “But what’s my incentive?” He can’t see why anyone would do anything for nothing.

  Modern psychology and neuroscience fail to back these bleak views. We’re preprogrammed to reach out. Empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control. We can suppress it, mentally block it, or fail to act on it, but except for a tiny percentage of humans—known as psychopaths—no one is emotionally immune to another’s situation. The fundamental yet rarely asked question is: Why did natural selection design our brains so that we’re in tune with our fellow human beings, feeling distress at their distress and pleasure at their pleasure? If exploitation of others were all that mattered, evolution should never have gotten into the empathy business.

  At the same time, I should add that I have absolutely no illusions about the nasty side of our species, or that of any other primate, for that matter. I have witnessed more blood and gore among monkeys and apes than most. Too many times, I have watched vicious fights, seen males kill infants, or been left inspecting the wounds on a dead monkey, trying to determine if they were made by the sharp canine teeth of a male (slashes and punctures) or the smaller teeth of females (bruises and ripped skin). Aggression was my first topic of study, and I’m fully aware that there’s no shortage of it in the primates.

  It was only later that I became interested in conflict resolution and cooperation. The final push in this direction came from the death of my favorite chimp during the Machiavellian power struggles described in Chimpanzee Politics. Right before I emigrated, in 1980, two males at the Dutch zoo where I worked assaulted and castrated a third, named Luit, who later succumbed to his injuries. Similar incidents are now known from the field. I’m not referring here to the well-documented warfare over territory, which is directed against out-group members, but to the fact that wild chimps, too, occasionally kill within their own community.

  Until this catastrophe, I had looked at conflict resolution as a mildly interesting phenomenon. I knew that chimpanzee contestants kiss and embrace each other after fights, but the shock of standing next to the veterinarian in a bloody operating room, handing him instruments for the hundreds of stitches he sewed, impressed upon me how critically important this behavior is. It helps apes maintain good relationships despite occasional conflict. Without these mechanisms, things get ugly. The tragic end of Luit opened my eyes to the value of peacemaking and played a major part in my decision to focus on what holds societies together.

  The violent nature of chimps is sometimes used as an argument against their having any empathy at all. Since we associate empathy with kindness, a common question is “If chimps hunt and eat monkeys and kill their own kind, how can they possibly possess empathy?” What’s most surprising is how rarely this question is being asked of our own species. If it were, we would of course be the first to disqualify as an empathic species. There exists in fact no obligatory connection between empathy and kindness, and no animal can afford treating everyone nicely all the time: Every animal faces competition over food, mates, and territory. A society based on empathy is no more free of conflict than a marriage based on love.

  Like other primates, humans can be described either as highly cooperative animals that need to work hard to keep selfish and aggressive urges under control or as highly competitive animals that nevertheless have the ability to get along and engage in give-and-take. This is what makes socially positive tendencies so interesting: They play out against a backdrop of competition. I rate humans among the most aggressive of primates but also believe that we’re masters at connecting and that social ties constrain competition. In other words, we are by no means obligatorily aggressive. It’s all a matter of ba
lance: Pure, unconditional trust and cooperation are naïve and detrimental, whereas unconstrained greed can only lead to the sort of dog-eat-dog world that Skilling advocated at Enron until it collapsed under its own mean-spirited weight.

  If biology is to inform government and society, the least we should do is get the full picture, drop the cardboard version that is Social Darwinism, and look at what evolution has actually put into place. What kind of animals are we? The traits produced by natural selection are rich and varied and include social tendencies far more conducive to optimism than generally assumed. In fact, I’d argue that biology constitutes our greatest hope. One can only shudder at the thought that the humaneness of our societies would depend on the whims of politics, culture, or religion.

  Ideologies come and go, but human nature is here to stay.

  Bodies Talking to Bodies

  When I’m watching an acrobat on a suspended wire,

  I feel I’m inside of him.

  THEODOR LIPPS, 1903

  One morning, the principal’s voice sounded over the intercom of my high school with the shocking announcement that a popular teacher of French had just died in front of his class. Everyone fell silent. While the headmaster went on to explain that the teacher had suffered a heart attack, I couldn’t keep myself from having a laughing fit. To this day, I feel embarrassed.

  What is it about laughter that makes it unstoppable even if triggered by inappropriate circumstances? Extreme bouts of laughter are worrisome: They involve loss of control, shedding of tears, gasping for air, leaning on others, even the wetting of pants while rolling on the floor! What a weird trick has been played on our linguistic species to express itself with stupid “ha ha ha!” sounds. Why don’t we leave it at a cool “that was funny”?