The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,349

makes us tick. But a little psychology can go a long way. It seems to me that a small number of quirks in our cognitive and emotional makeup give rise to a substantial proportion of avoidable human misery.298 It also seems to me that a shared inkling of these quirks has made some dents in the toll of violence and has the potential to chip away at much more. Each of our five inner demons comes with a design feature that we have begun to notice and would be wise to acknowledge further.

People, especially men, are overconfident in their prospects for success; when they fight each other, the outcome is likely to be bloodier than any of them thought. People, especially men, strive for dominance for themselves and their groups; when contests of dominance are joined, they are unlikely to sort the parties by merit and are likely to be a net loss for everyone. People seek revenge by an accounting that exaggerates their innocence and their adversary’s malice; when two sides seek perfect justice, they condemn themselves and their heirs to strife. People can not only overcome their revulsion to hands-on violence but acquire a taste for it; if they indulge it in private, or in cahoots with their peers, they can become sadists. And people can avow a belief they don’t hold because they think everyone else avows it; such beliefs can sweep through a closed society and bring it under the spell of a collective delusion.

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BETTER ANGELS

[It] cannot be disputed that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove, kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent. Let these generous sentiments be supposed ever so weak; let them be insufficient to move even a hand or finger of our body; they must still direct the determinations of our mind, and where every thing else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous.

—D avid Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

In every era, the way people raise their children is a window into their conception of human nature. When parents believed in children’s innate depravity, they beat them when they sneezed; when they believed in innate innocence, they banned the game of dodgeball. The other day when I was riding on my bicycle, I was reminded of the latest fashion in human nature when I passed a mother and her two preschoolers strolling on the side of the road. One was fussing and crying, and the other was being admonished by his mother. As I overtook the trio, I heard a stern Mommy voice enunciating one word: “EMPATHY!”

We live in an age of empathy. So announces a manifesto by the eminent primatologist Frans de Waal, one of a spate of books that have championed this human capability at the end of the first decade of the new millennium.1 Here is a sample of titles and subtitles that have appeared in just the past two years: The Age of Empathy, Why Empathy Matters, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, The Science of Empathy, The Empathy Gap, Why Empathy Is Essential (and Endangered), Empathy in the Global World, and How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy. In yet another book, The Empathic Civilization, the activist Jeremy Rifkin explains the vision:Biologists and cognitive neuroscientists are discovering mirror-neurons—the so-called empathy neurons—that allow human beings and other species to feel and experience another’s situation as if it were one’s own. We are, it appears, the most social of animals and seek intimate participation and companionship with our fellows.

Social scientists, in turn, are beginning to reexamine human history from an empathic lens and, in the process, discovering previously hidden strands of the human narrative which suggest that human evolution is measured not only by the expansion of power over nature, but also by the intensification and extension of empathy to more diverse others across broader temporal and spatial domains. The growing scientific evidence that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society, and may well determine our fate as a species.

What is required now is nothing less than a leap to global empathic consciousness and in less than a generation if we are to resurrect the global economy and revitalize the biosphere. The question becomes this: what is the mechanism that allows empathic sensitivity to mature and