Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

As Paul Ekman began to publish his work on the Foré, his papers set in motion a scientific revolution that required a radical revision of time-honored assumptions about human nature. This science began to uncover how emotions are wired into our facial anatomy, our vocalizations, our autonomic responses, and our brains. We learned that emotions support the commitments that make up the social contract with friends, romantic partners, siblings, and offspring. Emotions are not to be mastered by orderly reason; they are rational, principled judgments in their own right. Emotions do not subvert ethical living; they are guides to moral action, and they tell us what matters. Emotions like compassion, embarrassment, gratitude, and awe are the substance of high jen ratios and the meaningful life.

Deeper insights into the origins of the emotions—the very question that spurred Darwin to write Expression and that led Ekman to New Guinea—would come from new insights into the nature of human evolution. This new evolutionary literature, the topic of our next chapter, would reveal that those hominid predecessors guided by emotions such as compassion, embarrassment, and awe fared better in the tasks of survival, reproduction, and raising offspring to the age of viability. Evolution, it would seem, smiles upon those with higher jen ratios.

4Survival of the Kindest

 

IN NOVEMBER 1943, S. L. A. “Slam” Marshall, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, arrived with American troops on the beaches of Makin Island to fight the Japanese. After four days of bloody, chaotic combat, the Americans secured the island. In the ensuing calm, Marshall was asked to interview several soldiers to clarify some specifics of the four-day battle, with medals, heroic claims, and rights to wartime stories at stake. Marshall subsequently interviewed hundreds of soldiers who fought in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, often immediately after engagement. In 1947, he published the results from these interviews in Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command.

His interviews yielded an astonishing finding: Only 15 percent of World War II riflemen had fired at the enemy during combat. Often soldiers refused to fire at the enemy with superior officers barking commands nearby and bullets zipping past their heads. In the wake of this revelatory finding, the army radically changed how it prepared soldiers to kill. Infantry training exercises played down the notion that shooting kills humans. Soldiers were taught to shoot at nonhuman targets—trees, hills, bushes, cars, hovels, huts. The effects were dramatic. According to army estimates, 90 percent of soldiers in the Vietnam War fired at their enemies.

If Charles Darwin and his close intellectual peers—Thomas Henry Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace—were to discuss this finding with Charlie Rose or on C-SPAN—that in the heat of battle soldiers most typically refused to harm fellow human beings in spite of their self-preservation being on the line—they would reach contrasting conclusions. For Alfred Russel Wallace, a codiscoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, this concern for the welfare of others would be taken as evidence of how God has shaped human beings’ more benevolent tendencies. Wallace argued that while the body was shaped by natural selection, our mental faculties, and most notably our capacity for good, were created by “an unseen universe of the Spirit” (p. 354). It was some kind of spiritual force that kept soldiers from pulling the trigger to end the lives of enemies.

T. H. Huxley, progeny of one of England’s well-known intellectual families, was evolutionary theory’s fiercest early advocate and public spokesman. In Oxford and Cambridge circles he was nicknamed Darwin’s bulldog. He would have readily attributed Marshall’s findings to the constructive forces of culture. In Huxley’s view, human nature is aggressive and competitive, forged by evolution in a violent, selfish struggle for existence. Altruistic actions oriented toward benefiting the welfare of others—soldiers refusing to harm, daily civilities of public life, kindness toward strangers—must be cultivated by education and training. Cultural forces arise to counteract the base instincts that evolution has produced at the core of human nature.

Darwin would have reached yet a different conclusion, parting ways with his two colleagues. Had he been able to do so, he might have placed Marshall’s empirical gem in his first book on humans, Descent of Man, published twelve years after the On the Origin of Species. In Descent, Darwin argued that the social instincts—instincts toward sympathy, play, belonging in groups, caring for offspring, reciprocating acts of generosity, and worrying about the regard of others—are part of human nature. In Darwin’s typically modest but provocative prose: