Survival of the Kindest
Psychologist
Paul Ekman reveals Charles Darwin’s real view of compassion—and
it’s not what you might think. His belief that altruism is a vital
part of human and even animal life is being confirmed by modern
science.
 In
1871, eleven years before his death, Charles Darwin published what
has been called his “greatest unread book,” The Descent of Man
and Selection in Relation to Sex. His little-known discussion of
sympathy in this book reveals a facet of Darwin’s thinking that is
contrary to the competitive, ruthless, and selfish view of human
nature that has been mistakenly attributed to the Darwinian
perspective.
In
the fourth chapter, entitled “Comparison of the Mental Powers of
Man and the Lower Animals,” Darwin explained the origin of what he
called “sympathy” (which today would be termed empathy, altruism,
or compassion), describing how humans and other animals come to the
aid of others in distress. While he acknowledged that such actions
were most likely to occur within the family group, he wrote that the
highest moral achievement is concern for the welfare of all living
beings, both human and nonhuman.
It
should be no surprise, given Charles Darwin’s commitment to the
continuity of species, that he claimed that concern for the welfare
of others is not a uniquely human characteristic. Darwin tells the
following story: “Several years ago a keeper at the Zoological
Gardens showed me some deep and scarcely healed wounds on the nape of
his own neck, inflicted on him whilst kneeling on the floor, by a
fierce baboon. The little American monkey who was a warm friend of
this keeper, lived in the same compartment, and was dreadfully afraid
of the great baboon. Nevertheless, as soon as he saw his friend in
peril, he rushed to the rescue, and by screams and bites so
distracted the baboon that the man was able to escape.” This
incident is consistent with F.B.M. de Waal’s 2004 study, “On the
Possibility of Animal Empathy.”
The
likelihood of such actions, Darwin said, is greatest when the helper
is related to the person needing help. “It is evident in the first
place,” he wrote in The Descent of Man, “that with mankind
the instinctive impulses have different degrees of strength; a savage
will risk his own life to save that of a member of the same
community, but will be wholly indifferent about a stranger; a young
and timid mother urged by the maternal instinct will, without a
moment’s hesitation, run the greatest danger for her own infant…”
Darwin
recognized, however, that exceptional people will help total
strangers in distress, not just kin or loved ones. “Nevertheless
many a civilized man who never before risked his life for another,
but full of courage and sympathy, has disregarded the instinct of
self-preservation and plunged at once into a torrent to save a
drowning man, though a stranger. In this case man is impelled by the
same instinctive motive, which made the heroic little American
monkey, formerly described, save his keeper by attacking the great
and dreadful baboon.” Darwin’s line of thinking has been borne
out by K.R. Munroe’s 1996 study of exceptional individuals who
rescue strangers at risk of their own life, The Heart of
Altruism: Perceptions of A Common Humanity.
Darwin
did not consider why compassion toward strangers, even at the risk of
one’s life, is present in only some people. Is there a genetic
predisposition for such concerns, or does it result solely from
upbringing, or from some mix of nature and nurture? Nor did Darwin
write about whether it is possible to cultivate such
stranger-compassion in those who do not have it.
Today
these questions are the focus of theory (see P. Gilbert, ed.,
Compassion, Routledge, 2005) and empirical investigation
(D. Mobbs, et. al., “A Key Role for Similarity in
Vicarious Reward,” Science, 2009). In “Compassion: An
Evolutionary Analysis and Empirical Review,” in Psychological
Bulletin, Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas analyze the
psychological literature on empathy, altruism, and compassion,
integrating new evidence that they believe suggests compassion should
be considered an emotion. In a forthcoming paper, “Compassion and
Altruism: A Reformulation and Research Agenda,” Erika Rosenberg and
I consider what we call familial compassion to be an emotion,
albeit with a restricted target, but argue that it is not useful to
classify other forms of compassion as emotions.
Darwin
did offer an explanation of the origin of compassion: “We are,”
he wrote, “impelled to relieve the sufferings of another, in order
that our own painful feelings may be at the same time relieved…”
However, as Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace points out, not all
people respond to suffering in this way. He notes that a person
might, for instance, reflect, “How fortunate I am that I’m not
that other person.” Many years ago in my own research I found that
about a third of the people who witnessed a film of a person
suffering showed suffering on their own faces, but that an equal
number manifested disgust at the sight of suffering. These
proportions were the same among Japanese in Tokyo and Americans in
California, indicating that the reactions were not affected by
culture.
Darwin
also described how natural selection favored the evolution of
compassion, regardless of what originally motivated such behavior:
“In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as
it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and
defend one another, it will have been increased through natural
selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number
of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the
greatest number of offspring.”
However,
contrary to Darwin’s expectation, there are no countries today, or
in the known past, in which compassion and altruism toward strangers
are shown by the majority of the population, and later in this
chapter Darwin wrote more realistically about the extent of
compassion.
Darwin
concluded the discussion of the origin and nature of compassion and
altruism by describing what he considered the highest moral virtue.
He wrote: “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 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. [If they appear different] experience
unfortunately shews [sic] us how long it is before we look at them as
our fellow creatures. Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is
humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral
acquisitions… This virtue [concern for lower animals], one of the
noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from
our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until
they extend to all sentient beings.”
During
discussions I held with the Dalai Lama about emotions and compassion,
on which our book Emotional Awareness was based, I read this
last Darwin quote to him. The Dalai Lama’s translator, Thupten
Jinpa, exclaimed, “Did he use that phrase ‘all sentient beings’?”
Jinpa was surprised because this phrase is the exact English
translation of the Buddhist description of the all-encompassing
compassion of a bodhisattva.
Charles
Darwin was rare among thinkers of his time in taking this view, and
only in the latter part of the twentieth century did such a concern
for compassion toward nonhuman beings become more popular. Darwin was
far ahead of his time.
This
remarkable similarity between the Buddhist view of virtue and
Darwin’s raises the tantalizing possibility that Darwin might have
derived his views from Buddhist writings. Darwin did know at least
something about Buddhism by the time he wrote The Descent of Man.
J.D. Hooker, Darwin’s closest friend, spent many years in the
Himalayas. Leading Darwin scholar Janet Browne told me, “Darwin
might easily have discussed such matters with J.D. Hooker after
Hooker’s travels in Sikkim and elsewhere in India,” and Alison
Pearne, coeditor of Evolution: The Selected Letters of Charles
Darwin, notes that Hooker mentioned Buddhism in his letters to
Darwin from India. Nonetheless, the nub of Darwin’s ideas on
morality and compassion appear in his 1838 notebooks, two years after
his return from the voyage of the Beagle, when Darwin was
twenty-nine. This was five years before he met Hooker.
Randal
Keynes, Darwin’s great-great-grandson, described Darwin’s
thinking about these issues in the notebooks as follows: “His
comments were carelessly worded, but he was in no doubt about his
underlying aim. [Darwin wrote:] ‘Might not our sense of right and
wrong stem from reflection with our growing mental powers on our
actions as they were bound up with our instinctive feeling of love
and concern for others? If any animal with social instincts developed
the power of reflection, it must have a conscience.”
Darwin
noted in his M notebook: “Without regarding the origin…the
individual forgets itself, & aids & defends & acts for
others at its own expense.” Darwin was also interested at
this early point in his life in the origins of morality: “What has
produced the greatest good (or rather what is necessary for good
at all) is the (instinctive) moral senses… In Judging of the rule
of happiness we must look far forward (& to the general
action)—certainly because it is the result of what has generally
been best for our good far back… society could not go on
except for the moral sense.”
Darwin
noted his debt to David Hume. In 1838 Darwin read Hume’s Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Morals and thought it important for
developing a theory divorced from divine instruction. As Randal
Keynes remarks in Darwin, His Daughter & Human Evolution:
David
Hume had put sympathy at the center of his thinking about the natural
sources of moral principles. He saw it as a natural feeling rather
than an attitude based on reasoning from some abstract notion. “There
is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some
spark of friendship for humankind; some particle of the dove kneaded
in our frame, along with the element of the wolf and the serpent.”
Charles now developed this idea and speculated how our moral sense
might also grow naturally from that feeling. [Darwin wrote:] “Looking
at Man, as a Naturalist would at any other mammiferous animal, it may
be concluded that he has parental, conjugal and social instincts…
these instincts consist of a feeling of love or benevolence to the
object in question… such active sympathy that the individual
forgets itself, and aids and defends and acts for others at his own
expense.”
In
concluding the introduction to their edition of Descent of Man,
James Moore and Adrian Desmond wrote that some of Darwin’s
contemporaries who studied this book emphasized the “humane aspects
of Darwin’s Victorian values: duty, selflessness and
compassion…Frances Cobbe [a feminist theorist and pioneer animal
rights activist] excused readers who could picture ‘the author as a
man who has…unconsciously attributed his own abnormally generous
and placable nature to the rest of his species, and then theorized as
if the world were made of Darwins.’”
Darwin’s
thinking about compassion, altruism, and morality certainly reveals a
different picture of this great thinker’s concerns than the one
portrayed by those who focus on the catchphrase “the survival of
the fittest” (in fact a quote from Spencer, not Darwin). Those
unacquainted with his writings, and even some scientists, are unaware
of Darwin’s commitment to the unity of mankind, his abolitionist
convictions, and his intense interest in moral principles and human
and animal welfare.
Originally published in the November 2010 Shambhala Sun magazine.
.
|
