The Age of Empathy (31 page)

For most Europeans, this ideal takes a backseat to the advice from Dolly Levi, played by Barbra Streisand in the 1969 movie
Hello, Dolly!,
who exclaimed: “Money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around.” I have seen European newspaper editorials argue that television personalities should never earn more than the head of state, or that CEO salaries should never rise by a greater percentage than worker payment. As a result, Europe is a more livable place. It lacks the giant, nearly illiterate underclass of the United States, which lives on food stamps and relies on hospital emergency rooms for its health care. But Europe also has less of an incentive structure, resulting in a lower motivation for the unemployed to get jobs or for people to start a business. Hence the exodus of young entrepreneurs from France to London and other places.

U.S. CEOs easily earn several hundred times as much as the average worker, and the Gini index (a measure of national income inequality) of the United States has risen to unprecedented heights. The proportion of income owned by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans recently returned to the level of the Great Depression. The United States has become a winner-take-all society, as Robert Frank called it, with an income gap that seriously threatens its social fabric. The more the poor resent the rich, the more the rich fear the poor and retreat into gated communities. But an even greater burden is health: U.S. life expectancy now ranks below that of at least forty other nations. In principle, this could be due to recent immigration, lack of health insurance, or poor eating habits, but the relation between health and income distribution is in fact not explained by any of these factors. The same relation has also been demonstrated
within
the United States: Less egalitarian states suffer higher mortality.

Richard Wilkinson, the British epidemiologist and health expert who first gathered these statistics, has summarized them in two words: “inequality kills.” He believes that income gaps produce social gaps. They tear societies apart by reducing mutual trust, increasing
violence, and inducing anxieties that compromise the immune system of both the rich and the poor. Negative effects permeate the entire society:

Now, don’t get me wrong: No one in his right mind would argue that incomes should be leveled across the board, and only the most die-hard conservatives believe that we lack any obligation to the poor. Both kinds of fairness—the one that seeks a level playing field and the one that links rewards to effort—are essential. Both Europe and the United States pay a steep price, albeit different ones, for stressing one fairness ideal at the expense of the other. After having lived for so long in the United States, I find it hard to say which system I prefer. I see the pros and cons of both. But I also see it as a false choice: It’s not as if both fairness ideals couldn’t be combined. Individual politicians and their parties may be committed to either the left or right side of this equation, but every society zigzags between these poles in search of an equilibrium that offers the best economic prospects while still fitting the national character. Of the three ideals of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity—Americans will keep emphasizing the first and Europeans the second, but only the third speaks of inclusion, trust, and community. Morally speaking, fraternity is probably the noblest of the three and impossible to achieve without attention to both others.

Fraternity is also easiest to understand from a primate perspective, with survival relying so heavily on attachment, bonding, and group cohesion. Primates evolved to be community builders. Nevertheless, they are no stranger to equalizing tendencies and the link between effort and reward. When Bias screamed at Sammy for letting
her food get out of reach, she was protesting the loss of rewards that she had
worked
for. This was not just about equality. Like the vineyard workers, Bias seemed to take effort into account. In fact, in one of our studies we found that the more effort it takes to earn rewards, the more sensitive a primate becomes to seeing another get something better. It’s as if they’re saying, “After all this work, I still don’t get what he gets?!”

Such reactions typify primates with egalitarian tendencies but don’t necessarily apply to those that are strictly hierarchical, such as baboons. Baboons are marked by low social tolerance and empathy. When American primatologist Benjamin Beck watched a female baboon assist a male at the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago, his account offered an interesting reflection on dominance. Baboon males are twice the size of females and possess daggerlike canine teeth, and thus there’s never any doubt about who outranks whom. A female, named Pat, had learned to pick up a long rod in another part of the cage that was inaccessible to the male, Peewee. Peewee, in turn, knew how to use the rod to pull in food. Previously he had used the tool on his own, sharing only scattered bits of food with Pat. But the first time Pat spontaneously fetched his tool, which she did after a long grooming bout between the two, Peewee became like a new baboon. Having collected the bounty, he shared fifty/fifty with Pat. It was as if he recognized her contribution. But the more their cooperation grew, the more Pat’s share dwindled. In the end, she had to content herself with only about 15 percent. This was still better than nothing, which may explain why she kept bringing the rod, but it’s the sort of share that humans soundly reject in the ultimatum game. And not only humans: Had Pat been a capuchin monkey, or a chimpanzee, she would have thrown screaming tantrums at her compensation package.

I cannot help but ponder all of these fine distinctions between rank, equality, inequality, and deserved versus undeserved payoffs while reading passages, as in
Suite Française,
about aristocrats mingling with the common people. The context of an industrialized multilayered society is new but the emotional undercurrent of these encounters is a primate universal. Modern society taps into a long
history of hierarchy formation in which those lower on the scale not only fear the higher-ups but also resent them. We’re always ready to wobble the social ladder, a heritage going back to ancestors who roamed the savanna in small egalitarian bands. They gave us asymmetrical reactions to unfairness, always stronger in those who have less than in those who have more. While the latter are not totally indifferent, the ones who get truly worked up, angrily flinging their food away, are invariably the possessors of watery vegetables facing a happy few who gorge themselves on sugary fruits.

Robin Hood had it right. Humanity’s deepest wish is to spread the wealth.

Crooked Timber

A
sked by a religious magazine what I would change about the human species “if I were God,” I had to think hard. Every biologist knows the law of unintended consequences, a close cousin of Murphy’s law. Any time we fiddle with an ecosystem by introducing new species, we create a mess. Whether it is the introduction of the Nile perch to Lake Victoria, the rabbit to Australia, or kudzu to the southeastern United States, I am not sure we’ve ever brought improvement.

Each organism, including our own species, is a complex system in and of itself, so why would it be any easier to avoid unintended consequences? In his utopian novel
Walden Two,
B. F. Skinner thought humans could achieve greater happiness and productivity if parents stopped spending extra time with their children and people refrained from thanking one another. They were allowed to feel indebted to
their community, but not to one another. Skinner proposed other peculiar codes of conduct, but those two specifically struck me as blows to the pillars of any society: family ties and reciprocity. Skinner must have thought he could improve upon human nature. Along similar lines, I once heard a psychologist seriously propose that we should train children to hug one another several times a day, because isn’t hugging by all accounts a positive behavior that fosters good relations? It is, but who says that hugs performed on command work the same? Don’t we risk turning a perfectly meaningful gesture into one that we can’t trust anymore?

We have seen in Romanian orphanages what happens when children are subjected to the baby-factory ideas of behaviorist psychology. I remain deeply suspicious of any “restructuring” of human nature even though the idea has enjoyed great appeal over the ages. In 1922, Leon Trotsky described the prospect of a glorious New Man:

Marxism foundered on the illusion of a culturally engineered human. It assumed that we are born as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, to be filled in by conditioning, education, brainwashing, or whatever we call it, so that we’re ready to build a wonderfully cooperative society. A similar illusion plagued the U.S. feminist movement, which (unlike its
vive-la-différence
European counterpart) assumed that gender roles were ready for a complete overhaul. At around the same time, a famous sexologist proposed that a boy who’d lost part of his penis be surgically castrated and raised as a girl, and predicted that he’d be perfectly happy. This “experiment” produced a deeply confused individual, who committed suicide years later. One can’t just ignore the biology of gender identity. In the same way, our species has behavioral tendencies that no culture has ever been able to do away with.
As noted by Immanuel Kant, human nature is no more amenable to carving and shaping than is the toughest tree root.

Have you ever noticed how the worst part of someone’s personality is often also the best? You may know an anally retentive, detail-oriented accountant who never cracks a joke, nor understands any, but this is in fact what makes him the perfect accountant. Or you may have a flamboyant aunt who constantly embarrasses everyone with her big mouth, yet is the life of every party. The same duality applies to our species. We certainly don’t like our aggressiveness—at least on most days—but would it be such a great idea to create a society without it? Wouldn’t we all be as meek as lambs? Our sports teams wouldn’t care about winning or losing, entrepreneurs would be impossible to find, and pop stars would sing only boring lullabies. I’m not saying that aggressiveness is good, but it enters into everything we do, not just murder and mayhem. Removing human aggression is thus something to consider with care.

Humans are bipolar apes. We have something of the gentle, sexy bonobo, which we may like to emulate, but not too much; otherwise the world might turn into one giant hippie fest of flower power and free love. Happy we might be, but productive perhaps not. And our species also has something of the brutal, domineering chimpanzee, a side we may wish to suppress, but not completely, because how else would we conquer new frontiers and defend our borders? One could argue that there would be no problem if
all
of humanity turned peaceful at the same time, but no population is stable unless it’s immune to invasions by mutants. I’d still worry about that one lunatic who gathers an army and exploits the soft spots of the rest.

So, strange as it may sound, I’d be reluctant to radically change the human condition. But if I could change one thing, it would be to expand the range of fellow feeling. The greatest problem today, with so many different groups rubbing shoulders on a crowded planet, is excessive loyalty to one’s own nation, group, or religion. Humans are capable of deep disdain for anyone who looks different or thinks another way, even between neighboring groups with almost identical
DNA, such as the Israelis and Palestinians. Nations think they are superior to their neighbors, and religions think they own the truth. When push comes to shove, they are ready to thwart or even eliminate one another. In recent years, we have seen two huge office towers brought down by airplanes deliberately flown into them as well as massive bombing raids on the capital of a nation, and on both occasions the deaths of thousands of innocents was celebrated as a triumph of good over evil. The lives of strangers are often considered worthless. Asked why he never talked about the number of civilians killed in the Iraq War, U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld answered: “Well, we don’t do body counts on other people.”

Empathy for “other people” is the one commodity the world is lacking more than oil. It would be great if we could create at least a modicum of it. How this might change things was hinted at when, in 2004, Israeli justice minister Yosef Lapid was touched by images of a Palestinian woman 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?’” Even though Lapid’s sentiments infuriated the nation’s hard-liners, the incident showed what happens when empathy expands. In a brief moment of humanity, the minister had drawn Palestinians into his circle of concern.