As a new year starts again, it’s a good time to look at the big picture of humanity’s progress. One of my early posts highlighted several areas where humanity has made progress, including economic gains, health, and education. In this post, I would like to point out another area where humans have advanced over the many millennia of their existence. Namely, we have managed to expand the scope of kinship and empathy to include within our personal sphere of interest more and more previously alien and unrelated to us populations of humankind.
Humans are products of a long evolutionary process. As with other animals, we are wired so that mothers and fathers care about the raising of their off-springs. This allows the parents’ genes to survive and perpetuate. But how do we then explain the sacrifice of a non-parental relative to save the life of a member of his or her kinfolk? And how do we explain the sacrifice of an antelope that starts running around and ahead of an attacking lion to save the other members of the herd? In 1963, William Hamilton, a British biologist, came up with the idea of kin selection. Briefly, in order to survive, the genes of a species instill in its members the instinct of self-sacrifice. The bearer of the gene may die but the gene itself survives and thrives in the surviving members of the species. Thus remarkably, the selfish gene generates selfless behavior, that is, altruism. In the sixties, another biologist, George Williams, argued that altruism could break beyond the barrier of strict kinship.
The philosopher Peter Singer in his book The Expanding Circle has also suggested that human compassion can expand beyond a group of related humans. As an example, he refers to Plato who admonished his fellow Athenians not to enslave other Greeks in times of war. Based on their covenant with Yahweh, ancient Hebrews also developed a sense of kinship across the people of Israel. This is what Darwin had to say on the same topic in The Descent of Man: “As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”
The barrier Darwin and Williams alluded to is nothing else but the degree of our familiarity with other members of our species. As I was mulling the thoughts for this post in my head, The NYT (12/29/2018) published a pictorial OP-ART piece by Henry J. Garrett. It starts with the drawing of a rat’s head and the legend “Morality exists only because we evolved the capacity to empathize.” Then in a series of drawings, Garrett tells the story of experiments in the U. of Chicago that have shown the following: (a) a white rat that had been raised among white rats did not save a black rat from a trap (I cannot help but quip here that this is the case of ‘I don’t give a rat’s ass’.) Conversely, a white rat raised among black rats was indifferent to the danger faced by a white rat. But even more remarkably, a white rat raised with white and black rats rescued rats regardless of their color. The bottom line of these experiments is that altruism and empathy work best when we get to know members of our species that we would otherwise incline to categorize as “other” than us.
Coming back to our human story on earth, how have we done in this respect? I believe, remarkably well despite lapses of indifference to the hardships of other humans and even lapses of brutality. The more familiar we have become with other people the more interest we seem to show in their condition. Our sense of kinship (in the broader sense) has expanded from the family level to that of the tribe, of the ethnic group, of the nation. Of course, the path has not been smooth and without violence. When encountered by the unknown and the other, our first instinct has been to dominate or even eliminate. European explorers mistreated and often slaughtered indigenous people in the Americas and Africa. People have killed and continue to kill others in the name of faith or ideology or territory. However, since the Second World War humanity has striven to take a different course. The Declaration of Universal Human Rights and the various international institutions set up by the UN have drawn peoples of the world together in the fight against human abuses, illiteracy, and diseases. Agreements on climate and environmental sustainability are examples of the global sense that our species shares a common fate on this planet (in spite of the occasional doubters and disrupting actors that regrettably include the current US president).
Nonetheless, however cooperative and contributing to a mutual perspective of common problems these international set ups are, they would not be enough to generate the scale of empathy or kinship that Darwin and Singer had in mind. What has brought us together is the phenomenal advances in transportation, telecommunications, commerce, news and nowadays social media. It is these advances that have allowed millions of people to get familiar with other people over the past one hundred plus years. Television news, newspapers, YouTube, and other social media make us aware of the strife, hardship, brutality, hunger, and sickness that people we never met may suffer in remote corners of the world. Even more remarkably, we notice that looking at photos of the dead body of a migrant child washed up in the shores of Turkey, or the fleeing Rohingya, or the skeletal bodies of Yemeni children arouses our empathy as if these were our kin. It is in response to the development of a more global perspective about our common bonds as a species that so many international organizations have sprung up in order to alleviate pain and foster wellbeing. The Red Cross/Crescent, Doctors without Borders, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Children, UNICEF, and so many more are examples of our broadening sense of kinship.
It seems that, like the rats in the U. of Chicago experiment, we humans also adapt toward a stronger feeling of kinship as we become more familiar with the “other.” Nature and selfish genes can take us though only so far. Now that we know what builds empathy, let’s continue to build the environment that promotes interaction and familiarity. What draws us closer makes us a better species.
Let's Reason 