The Compassionate Instinct

In effect, these egalitarian bands did something very special about the problem of power. They arrived at a largely implicit “social contract,” by which each political actor conceded his or her personal pursuit of dominance in order to remain at political parity with his or her peers. In doing so, hunter-gatherers were able to cooperate effectively because their societies were so small. Similarly, a large national democracy can do its best to vigilantly limit power and uphold civil rights. But just like a hunting band, it must watch carefully for would-be dictators in order to preemptively curb their power if need be and stand up to them decisively if they do get the bit in their teeth.

This theory about our political evolution helps us understand why we are so often ambivalent about power. Our genetic nature makes both its abuse and our counterreactions equally likely. And if these counterreactions don’t come strongly enough and in a timely fashion, this may bode badly for a nation’s citizens, subjecting them to harsh restrictions of their pursuits of liberty and happiness. Indeed, if that nation happens to be a world superpower, this can have disastrous consequences for an entire world of nations.

THE FORGIVENESS INSTINCT

Michael E. McCullough

EARLY ON THE MORNING of October 26, 2001, 25-year-old Chante Mallard was driving home along Interstate 820, just southeast of Fort Worth, Texas, after a long night of partying. Fatigue, combined with the many substances in her bloodstream—alcohol, marijuana, ecstasy—had impaired her judgment and slowed her reaction time. As she rounded the horseshoe-shaped curve to merge onto Route 287, Mallard drove her car straight into a man who had been walking along the dark highway. Gregory Biggs, 37 years old, was catapulted onto the hood of Mallard’s car. His head and upper body went crashing through the windshield and landed on the passenger-side floorboard. His legs remained trapped inside the windshield.

With all of the drugs and the noise and the broken glass, Mallard was so disoriented at first that she didn’t even know that a human being was stuck in her windshield. When she realized what had happened, she stopped the car, got out, and went around to try and help. But as soon as she touched Biggs’s leg, she panicked. In her drug-addled state, she couldn’t figure out what to do next. So with Biggs still immobilized in the windshield, she drove the final mile back to her house, pulled into the garage, and closed the garage door behind her. Mallard let Biggs bleed to death right there in the garage. Over and over, Biggs begged Mallard to help him, but Mallard, a nurse’s aide, insisted there was nothing she could do for him. So she left him to die. Medical examiners would later testify that Biggs would surely have survived the crash had he received prompt medical attention.

The next night, Mallard and two friends dumped Biggs’s body in a nearby park. An informant told police that she had joked about the event later.

It was several months before the police received the tip that would lead them to Mallard. After her arrest, Mallard was tried and convicted of murder. She was sentenced to 50 years in prison. At her sentencing hearing, Biggs’s son Brandon had the opportunity to make a victim impact statement. Instead of using this opportunity to request the harshest possible sentence, Brandon said to the court and to Mallard’s family, “There’s no winners in a case like this. Just as we all lost Greg, you all will be losing your daughter.” Later, Brandon would go on to say, “I still want to extend my forgiveness to Chante Mallard and let her know that the Mallard family is in my prayers.”

An act of forgiveness like this is astonishing, but Brandon Biggs is hardly unique. In more than a decade of researching forgiveness, I’ve come across hundreds of stories like Brandon’s—acts of forgiveness for transgressions small and large. Over and over, I’ve been amazed by stories of people who seem to transcend the natural urge for revenge and, instead, find a way to forgive.

But for every one of those stories, you could probably counter with an equally astonishing story of vengeance. I also know these stories well: The grieving father who murders the air traffic controller he blames for his family’s death. The disenfranchised loner who, feeling abused by the system, takes a giant bulldozer, converts it into an assault vehicle, then razes the homes and workplaces of people who have caused him pain. The men whose desire for vengeance against what they view as an unjust foreign occupation leads them to capture westerners, behead them, and incinerate their bodies for the world to see.