Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Darwin’s elevation of sympathy as the strongest of our instincts, and as the foundation of ethical systems, has not attracted many adherents in the annals of Western thought. More typically, sympathy and compassion have been treated with dismissive skepticism or downright derision. Thomas Huxley argued that evolution did not produce a biologically based capacity to care; instead, kindness, cooperation, and compassion are cultural creations, constructed within religious commandments and rituals, in norms governing public exchange, codified in social organizations, as desperate attempts to rein in, to countervail man’s base tendencies. The regularity of parents abandoning and abusing children, infanticide, torture, and genocide lend compelling, if not overwhelming, credence to Huxley’s counterpoint. Scientists searching for an evolved, biological basis of compassion, by implication, would be grasping at the air, tilting their labs at windmills.

Other influential thinkers in the Western canon, reveals philosopher Martha Nussbaum in her brilliant history of the study of emotion in Upheavals of Thought, have gone further. The trend in Western thought has been to argue that compassion is an unreliable guide to ethical behavior (see quotations below). Compassion is “blind,” too subjective to be a universal guide to the conscience and ethical conduct. It is imbued with the individual’s idiosyncratic concerns (what’s unwarranted suffering in my eyes is justified in yours). Compassion is “weak” it enfeebles the individual in the hard work of meting out justice.

 

 

A feeling of sympathy is beautiful and amiable; for it shows a charitable interest in the lot of other men…. But this good-natured passion is nevertheless weak and always blind.

IMMANUEL KANT,Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

 

 

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

AYN RAND, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World”

 

 

A transvaluation of values, under the new pressure and hammer of which a conscience should be steeled and a heart transformed into brass, as to bear the weight of such a responsibility.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil, section 203

 

 

Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.

MACHIAVELLI

 

 

These old notions have blinded the scientific study of compassion. New empirical studies, though, have mushroomed, and yet again give the nod to Darwin. Compassion is a biologically based emotion rooted deep in the mammalian brain, and shaped by perhaps the most potent of selection pressures humans evolved to adapt to—the need to care for the vulnerable. Compassion is anything but blind; it is finely attuned to vulnerability. It is anything but weak; it fosters courageous, altruistic action often at significant cost to the self. These discoveries would be founded upon the study of a region of the nervous system that has remained mysterious to scientific understanding until recently.

LOST VAGUS

 

In calling sympathy the strongest of instincts, Darwin was touching a nerve in the veins of canonical Western thought. Little did he know, Darwin was also touching another nerve, literally a bundle of nerves, known as the vagus nerve, which resides in the chest and, when activated, produces a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat. The vagus nerve originates in the top of the spinal cord and then winds its way through the body (vagus is Latin for wandering), connecting up to facial muscle tissue, muscles that are involved in vocalization, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys and liver, and the digestive organs. In a series of controversial papers, physiological psychologist Steve Porges has made the case that the vagus nerve is the nerve of compassion, the body’s caretaking organ.