The Age of Empathy (33 page)

Torture requires an appreciation of what others think or feel. To attach electrodes to the genitals of prisoners, hang them upside down for prolonged periods of time, simulate drowning during so-called “waterboarding,” or urinate on their Bible or Koran rests on our ability to assume their viewpoint and realize what will hurt or aggravate them the most. Go to any medieval torture museum, with its garrotes, chairs with spikes, head crushers, and thumb screws, and see what human imagination has wrought in the service of suffering. Our species even engages in vicarious torture. To rape a woman in front of her husband is not only brutal to her, but also a way of tormenting him. It exploits the bond one person feels with another. Cruelty, too, rests on perspective-taking.

One mental illness is marked by a permanent disconnect between perspective-taking and the deeper regions of empathy. The label of “psychopath” is often associated with violence, such as serial killers Ted Bundy and Harold Shipman
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or mass murderers, such as Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and Saddam Hussein. But psychopathy takes many forms. The condition is defined by an antisocial attitude without loyalty to anyone except the self. Think of the boyfriend who leaves a woman after having emptied out her bank account, but who returns months later with a bouquet of roses for a tearful reunion so that he can move back in and start the whole cycle over again. Or the CEO who makes loads of money over the backs of others, even talking trusting employees into holding on to company stock at the very moment that he himself is unloading his shares, as Kenneth Lay did before Enron’s collapse in 2001. People without mercy and morals are all around us, often in prominent positions. These snakes in suits, as one book title labels them, may represent a small percentage of the population, but they thrive in an economic system that rewards ruthlessness.

The comparison with snakes is apt, since psychopaths seem to lack the Russian doll’s old mammalian core. They do possess all of its
cognitive outer layers, allowing them to understand what others want and need as well as what their weaknesses are, but they couldn’t care less about how their behavior impacts them. According to one theory, they suffer from a developmental disorder that puts them on a wrong learning track early in life. If a normal child makes a younger sibling cry, it will be troubled by the other’s distress. The result is aversive conditioning: Children learn not to pester or hit others. Like all social animals, they discover that if you want to have fun, it isn’t a good idea to make your playmate yell out in pain. With age, children become gentler with younger, weaker parties, controlling their strength the way a large dog plays with a smaller one or a cat, or for that matter, how a 1,200-pound polar bear plays with a husky. The young psychopath, by contrast, starts life without this sensitivity. Nothing in an encounter with a vulnerable party, least of all teary protest, tells him to back off. On the contrary, all that he ever seems to learn is that hurting others yields benefits. Isn’t it an excellent way of getting toys or winning games? The young psychopath only sees the upside of defeating others. The result is a different learning curve, one that culminates in manipulation and intimidation without the slightest worry about the pain it may cause.

Being gentle with vulnerable others is something all children and animals learn during play, such as a polar bear here with a sled dog.

A lot of trouble in the world can be traced to people whose Russian doll is an empty shell. Like aliens from another planet, they are intellectually capable of adopting another’s viewpoint without any of the accompanying feelings. They successfully fake empathy. Whenever they achieve power, which they often do thanks to their Machiavellian skills, their disdain for truth and morality allows
them to manipulate others into carrying out their evil plans. Their authority overrides the better judgment of underlings so that sometimes an entire nation, for example Germany in the previous century, falls for the cruel fantasies of a charismatic psychopath.

What makes it so hard to wrap our heads around this mental disorder is that we can’t imagine being immune to the suffering of others. Mark Rowlands, in
The Philosopher and the Wolf,
describes how hard he found it to treat his house pet. Brenin, the wolf, needed regular cleaning and antibiotics for an infection near his anus, which was excruciatingly painful for him, and by extension for his master. This is what empathy does: It makes it tough to hurt others even if done for a good reason. In a philosophical twist, Rowlands reflected on Tertullian of Carthage, a theologian of early Christianity. This zealous defender of the truth had a most unusual description of heaven. While hell was a place of torture, heaven was a balcony from which the saved ones could watch hell, thus enjoying the spectacle of others frying. One must indeed be close to psychopathy to imagine eternal spite as a blessed state. For most of us, it’s almost harder to watch the suffering of others than to suffer ourselves, which is why Rowland adds, “In those days that Brenin was dying, I used to think that this was what hell was—being forced to torture a wolf I loved.”

All of this is to contrast those who do empathize with those who don’t. This is not to say, though, that those who do, do so all the time. What kind of life would we have if we shared in every form of suffering in the world? Empathy needs both a filter that makes us select what we react to, and a turn-off switch. Like every emotional reaction, it has a “portal,” a situation that typically triggers it or that we allow to trigger it. Empathy’s chief portal is identification. We’re ready to share the feelings of someone we identify with, which is why we do so easily with those who belong to our inner circle: For them the portal is always ajar. Outside this circle, things are optional. It depends on whether we can afford being affected, or whether we want to be. If we notice a beggar in the street, we can choose to look at him, which may arouse our pity, or we can look away, even walk to the other side of
the street, to avoid facing him. We have all sorts of ways to open or close the portal.

The moment we buy a movie ticket, we choose to identify with the leading character, thus making ourselves vulnerable to empathizing. We swoon when she falls in love or leave the theater in tears because of her untimely death, even though it’s just a character played by someone we don’t personally know. On the other hand, we sometimes deliberately shut the portal, such as when we suppress identification with a declared enemy group. We do so by removing their individuality, defining them as an anonymous mass of unpleasant, inferior specimens of a different taxonomic group. Why should we put up with those dirty “cockroaches” (the Hutus about the Tutsis) or disease-ridden “rats” (the Nazis about the Jews)? Called the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, dehumanization has a long history of excusing atrocities.

Since men are the more territorial gender, and overall more confrontational and violent than women, one would expect them to have the more effective turn-off switch. They clearly do have empathy, but perhaps apply it more selectively. Cross-cultural studies confirm that women everywhere are considered more empathic than men, so much so that the claim has been made that the female (but not the male) brain is hardwired for empathy. I doubt that the difference is that absolute, but it’s true that at birth girl babies look longer at faces than boy babies, who look longer at suspended mechanical mobiles. Growing up, girls are more prosocial than boys, better readers of emotional expressions, more attuned to voices, more remorseful after having hurt someone, and better at taking another’s perspective. When Carolyn Zahn-Waxler measured reactions to distressed family members, she found girls looking more at the other’s face, providing more physical comfort, and more often expressing concern, such as asking “Are you okay?” Boys are less attentive to the feelings of others, more action- and object-oriented, rougher in their play, and less inclined to social fantasy games. They prefer collective action, such as building something together.

Men can be quite dismissive of empathy. It’s not particularly manly to admit to it, and one reason why it has taken so long for research in this area to take off is undoubtedly that academics saw empathy as a bleeding-heart topic associated with the weaker sex. That this is a traditional attitude is exemplified by Bernard de Mandeville, a Dutch philosopher and satirist of the eighteenth century who saw “pity” as a character flaw:

The tortuous nature of this statement is understandable for a cynic who gave the world its first greed creed. Mandeville didn’t know where to fit the tender emotions, but was at least honest enough to recognize that society would be in trouble without them.

Despite the association of empathy with women rather than men, some studies paint a more complex picture. They call gender differences in this regard “exaggerated,” even “nonexistent.” These claims are puzzling given the well-documented difference between boys and girls. Are we to believe that the sexes converge with age? My guess is that they don’t, and that the confusion stems from the way men and women have been tested by psychologists. Asked about loved ones, such as their parents, wife, children, and close friends, most men are plenty empathic. The same applies in relation to unfamiliar, neutral parties. Men are perfectly willing to empathize under such circumstances, the way they often can’t keep their eyes dry in romantic or tragic movies. With their portal open, men can be just as empathic as women.

But things change radically when men enter a competitive mode, such as when they’re advancing their interests or career. Suddenly, there’s little room for softer feelings. Men can be brutal toward potential rivals: Anyone who stands in the way has to be taken down. Sometimes the physicality slips out, such as when Jesse Jackson, the longtime African American alpha male, expressed his feelings about the new kid on the block, Barack Obama, in 2008. In surreptitiously taped comments on a television show, Jackson said about Obama that he’d like to “cut his nuts off.” At other times, things literally get physical, such as the way the head of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, reacted to hearing that a senior engineer of his company was going to work for his competitors at Google. Ballmer was said to have picked up a chair and thrown it forcefully across the room, hitting a table. After this chimpanzee-like display, he launched into a tirade about how he was going to fucking kill those Google boys.

Many men love action movies, which would be a disastrous experience if they had any sympathy for their hero’s adversaries. The villains are blown to pieces, riddled with bullets, thrown into shark-infested pools, and pushed out of flying airplanes. None of this bothers the audience. On the contrary, they pay to watch the carnage. Sometimes the hero himself gets caught, then is strung up in chains and tormented with burning coals, which makes the audience squirm. But since it’s just a movie, he always gets out and exacts revenge, which is sweeter the nastier it gets.

Male primates may be similar. Robert Sapolsky, who occasionally tranquilizes wild baboons, learned the hard way how dangerous it is to dart a male in front of his rivals. As soon as the darted male’s walk becomes unsteady, others close in, seeing a perfect opportunity to get him. There is no problem with the females, but male baboons are always ready to take advantage of another’s weakness. This is why vulnerabilities are hidden. I have known male chimps who went into unusually vigorous intimidation displays during times that they were sick or injured. They’d be licking their wounds one minute, looking miserable, but then their main rival would show up and suddenly
they’d be full of muscle power, at least for the few minutes that mattered. In the same way, I imagine a group of human ancestors in which men camouflaged for as long as possible any limp, reduced eyesight, or loss of stamina so as not to give the others any ideas. This is why the Kremlin used to prop up its ailing leaders, and why enterprises sometimes hesitate to disclose the health problems of their CEOs, as Apple did with Steve Jobs. In modern society, it’s often said that men don’t go to the doctor as easily as women because they have been socialized to act tough, but what if there’s a much deeper reason? Perhaps males always feel surrounded by others hoping for them to stumble.

The opposite occurs when men are in the company of trusted parties. Often this will be a wife or girlfriend, but it extends to their best male buddies. Men value nothing more than loyalty, and in these situations they do show vulnerability, which elicits sympathy. There’s plenty of this among men on the same team, such as in sports or the military, and I once saw an interesting sign of it among chimpanzees. An old male had partnered with a younger one, who was more muscular and energetic. The old male had helped his friend reach the top, but one day this new leader nevertheless bit his partner in a conflict over a female. This was not very smart, because his position depended on the old male’s support. Naturally, the young male did a lot of grooming to smooth things over, but the old fox—perhaps the most cunning chimp I’ve ever known—couldn’t resist rubbing in how much he had been hurt. For days, he limped pitifully each time he was in view of the young leader, whereas away from him he walked normally. Now, why put up an act like this, if sympathy plays no role in male relations?