Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

I wish I could do full-body fMRIs of people’s nervous systems in settings through which HHDL moves. If I could, I would find that his touch produces the colorful activation of goodwill in the brain and body. HHDL’s vocabulary of touch is as precise and imaginative as a chess master’s representation of the possibilities on the 64 squares of the chessboard. As we concluded our panel in Vancouver, HHDL tickled Paul Ekman in the ribs. In the midst of a discussion about neural plasticity, HHDL squeezed neuroscientist Richie Davidson’s earlobe. In his deep, bowed greetings with other Tibetan monks, HHDL rubs the corner of his head against that of the other monk, triggering laughter. HHDL is known to fall to the floor and wrestle with Desmond Tutu, as though the two were preteen brothers. HHDL’s genius at touch is a window into an ancient communicative system by which we can alter others’ jen ratios, spreading health and happiness to others.

VIRAL JEN

 

In John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart, tired of bumming smokes and meals off expatriate Americans in Tampico, Mexico, encamps with two other down-on-their-luck prospectors in the arid mountains of the Sierra Madre. They are in search of gold. As their bags of gold dust mount in weight and number, the three men confront an ancient evolutionary problem—how to build and maintain trust between nonkin. In their high chaparral camp, the opportunities for exploitation are infinite—a quick escape with the gold during the heavy sleep following a day of moving dirt, a silent murder in a desert ravine, an alliance of two ganging up on the third. In the face of the pull of exploitative self-interest, the band of desperate prospectors hold tight. They are bound together in cooperative spirit by enthusiasm, camaraderie, the reverie of the meals and clothes and farms and white picket fences they envision enjoying with their newfound fortunes, and the laughter, banter, backslapping, and firm handshakes of men cooperating.

When a mine shaft collapses on Bogart, he suffers a blow to his head. Like Muybridge, his mind shifts to the orientation of dog-eat-dog survival, and he leads the group into a nightmarish battle of distrust and exploitation. Ambiguous actions out in the desert—a partner claims to be searching under a rock for a Gila monster—appear to cynical eyes to be attempts at searching for the other’s hidden bags of gold. The language of friendship—“buddy,” “friend,” nicknames—shifts to the sharp, impersonal tones of last names. Suspicions about the imagined interests of others escalate into gun-pointing confrontations.

This high mountain drama parallels a central dynamic in the evolution of cooperation. How might cooperation, kindness and jen emerge in social groups composed of individuals who are better off pursuing self-interest? As we learned from the lessons of the tit-for-tat, an answer is found in the contagious goodness hypothesis. Simply put, cooperation and kindness will take hold in groups when jen becomes viral, when individuals can readily signal their kind intentions to others and evoke similar inclinations. In this fashion, people are less likely to experience the costs of being generous to competitive individuals, and more likely to enjoy the fruits of mutual cooperation—reciprocal trades of resources, sharing in parental care, and so on.

Jen becomes viral through behaviors that spread goodness from one individual to the next, thus setting in motion reinforcing, reciprocal cooperation. These behaviors would need to be powerful and fast, to counteract the mind’s automatic tendency to perceive threat, danger, and competition in nearby, fast-moving bundles of self-interest—namely other humans. These behaviors would need to operate on the bodies of others, to shift the nervous system away from its potent, trigger-happy fight/flight tendencies toward a physiological profile more conducive to cooperation and kindness. These contagious behaviors would need to be easy to use and readily adaptable to the close proximity of the daily interactions of our hominid predecessors. These contagious behaviors, as signals of cooperation and trust, would need to be easy to perceive and hard to feign.