The Age of Empathy (7 page)

A student of mine, Jessica Flack, investigated the effect of such behavior in a different primate: the pigtail macaque. These handsome monkeys, with short curly tails, have a reputation for being highly intelligent. In Southeast Asia, the muscular males are commonly employed as “farm hands,” which may lead to startling encounters in city traffic. A man will drive by on a motorbike with a nonhuman passenger sitting upright like a real person on the backseat, legs dangling on both sides. He is on his way to work at a plantation. The monkeys have been trained to follow shouted commands from the ground while they are high up in a palm tree dislodging ripe coconuts, which their master collects under the tree and sells on the market.

Pigtail macaques normally live in groups in which high-ranking males, like chimp males, act as police: They step in to break up fights and maintain order. We worked with about eighty monkeys in a large open-air corral. For days on end, Jessica would sit in a tower in the heat of a Georgia summer, with water in one hand and a microphone in the other, to narrate thousands of social events. Like studies of so-called knockout mice, in which a gene is disabled to study its effects, ours was a knockout study in which we temporarily inactivated the police to see how the group would fare.

Every two weeks, we’d pick a day on which the top three males were removed in the morning and put back in in the evening. The males were kept in a building next to the corral. If a skirmish broke out in the group, monkeys sometimes ran to the door behind which
the males sat to scream through the cracks, but obviously they’d have to work things out on their own that day. The effect of the knockouts was entirely negative: They produced increased fighting, more intense aggression, less reconciliation after fights, and a drop in grooming and play. On all measures, monkey society was falling apart.

A few individuals can make a huge difference: Social life benefits enormously from policing males. Note that the argument here is not that they sacrifice themselves for the group. All group-oriented behavior—mediation, disarmament, policing—serves the individuals who perform it. Females have an interest in reducing tensions among males, for whom it is not unusual to take their problems out on females and young. And males who are effective at keeping the peace often become enormously popular and respected in the group. But even so, group-oriented behavior improves the quality of the social environment not just for the individuals who show it, but for everyone else as well.

We often take collectivity for granted, but all group-living organisms are sensitive to it. They’re all in the same boat. If this applies to other primates, how much more so to our own species with its more intricate societies? Most of us recognize the need to uphold certain services and institutions and are prepared to work toward this goal. Social Darwinists may disagree, but from a truly Darwinian perspective it is entirely logical to expect a “social motive” in group-living animals, one that makes them strive for a well-functioning whole.

By itself, this motive doesn’t suffice. Perhaps bees or ants—that live in communities in which everyone is closely related and serves the same queen—are willing to work their hearts out for the common good, but humans are not. No matter how much brainwashing we engage in and patriotic songs we sing, we will always think of ourselves before we think of society. If any good has come out of the communist “experiment,” it is this clarification of the limits of solidarity.

Purely selfish motives, on the other hand, don’t suffice, either. There’s such a thing as “enlightened” self-interest, which makes us
work toward the kind of society that serves our own best interests. Both rich and poor rely on the same sewer system, highways, and law enforcement. All of us need national defense, education, and health care. A society operates like a contract: Those who gain from it are expected to contribute, and conversely, those who contribute feel entitled to get something out of it. We enter this contract automatically while growing up in a society, and react with outrage if it’s violated.

At a 2007 political rally, Steve Skvara, a steelworker from Indiana, almost burst into tears describing his predicament:

In the same way that Skvara felt an obligation to his wife, society ought to feel an obligation toward him after a lifetime of hard work. This is a
moral
issue, which is why Skvara received a standing ovation when he challenged the political candidates present, adding “What’s wrong with America and what will you do to change it?”

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.

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.