Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;

And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers…and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love.

 

I would have tried to convey that their lives, and their children’s lives, and those of their friends, and the character of the communities they will inhabit, are shaped by their search for these four passions. I would have wished them well in hoping that life’s arrangements would allow for the fullest expression of these four loves.

11Compassion

 

ONE DAY WHILE FIGHTING in the Spanish civil war, George Orwell encountered an enemy Fascist face-to-face. The soldier came running by, panting, half dressed, stumbling, holding up his pants with clenched hand. Orwell refused to shoot. Later he reflected: “I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘fascists’ but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.” The sight of the Fascist’s bare chest, his skin, his disheveled condition, had short-circuited Orwell’s instinct to kill.

In Humanity, historian Jonathan Glover documents many such “sympathy breakthroughs” in the wars of the twentieth century—in Stalin’s purges, the My Lai massacre, the killing fields in Cambodia, the genocide in Rwanda. These are moments when soldiers break free from the dutiful honoring of the military code, from strict orders to shoot on sight, and are overwhelmed by the humanity of the humans they are killing. Most often it is when encountering children and women—for example, the toddlers and pregnant women beheaded and disemboweled in the My Lai massacre. Most often the sympathy breakthroughs are triggered by eye-to-eye contact, the sight of the enemy’s pupils, the pores on his skin, oblique movements in his eyebrows.

No sympathy breakthrough was more dramatic than that of Miklós Nyiszli, a medical doctor at a Nazi concentration camp. One day as a gas chamber was being cleared of bodies, a young girl of sixteen was found alive at the bottom of the rigor mortis pile of thin-limbed, stiffening corpses. The attending staff reflexively offered the young girl an old coat, warm broth, tea, and reassuring touch to her shoulders and back. Nyiszli tried to persuade the concentration camp’s commandant to save her. One proposal was to hide her amid German women working at the camp. The commandant toyed with this possibility momentarily but in the end had her killed by his method of choice—the young girl was shot in the back of the neck.

Human history, Glover contends, can be thought of as a contest between cruelty and compassion, tellingly revealed in wartime sympathy breakthroughs, when the force of compassion overwhelms the edicts of war. You could make the same case about human nature. Fight/flight tendencies of self-preservation are continually at odds with tendencies to care in the electrochemical flow of our nervous systems. The content of the mind shifts between the press of self-interest and the push of compassion. The ebb and flow of marriages, families, friends, and workplaces track the dynamic tension between these two great forces—raw self-interest and a devotion to the welfare of the other. The study of emotion is experiencing its own “sympathy breakthrough” thanks to recent studies of compassion, which are revealing this caretaking emotion to be built into our nervous systems. The study of this emotion holds new clues about the health of marriages, families, and communities.

THE COMPASSION CONSPIRACY

 

As Charles Darwin developed his first account of the evolution of humans in the Descent of Man, he argued for “the greater strength of the social or maternal instincts than that of any other instinct or motive.” His reasoning was disarmingly intuitive: In those collectives of our hominid predecessors, communities of more sympathetic individuals were more successful in raising healthier offspring to the age of viability and reproduction—the surest route to getting genes to the next generation, the sine qua non of evolution.