It’s one thing to sympathize with a character in need, but it’s another to generalize one’s sympathy to the group that the character represents. Do readers sympathize just with Uncle Tom or with all African American slaves? With Oliver Twist or with orphaned children in general? With Anne Frank or with all victims of the Holocaust? In an experiment designed to test for such generalizations, students listened to the plight of Julie, a young woman who had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion after a car accident. (The experiment was run before effective treatments had been discovered for that often-fatal disease.)
Well, as you can imagine, it’s pretty terrifying. I mean, every time I cough or feel a bit run down, I wonder, is this it? Is this the beginning—you know—of the slide? Sometimes I feel pretty good, but in the back of my mind it’s always there. Any day I could take a turn for the worse [pause]. And I know that—at least right now—there’s no escape. I know they’re trying to find a cure—and I know that we all die. But it all seems so unfair. So horrible. Like a nightmare. [pause] I mean, I feel like I was just starting to live, and now, instead, I’m dying. [pause] It can really get you down.60
Later, when the students were asked to fill out a questionnaire on attitudes toward people with AIDS, the perspective-takers had become more sympathetic than the technical evaluators, showing that sympathy had indeed spread from the individual to the class she represented. But there was an important twist. The effect of perspective-taking on sympathy was gated by moralization, as we might expect from the fact that sympathy is not an automatic reflex. When Julie confessed to having contracted the disease after a summer of unprotected promiscuous sex, the perspective-takers were more sympathetic to the broad class of victims of AIDS, but they were no more sympathetic to the narrower class of young women with AIDS. Similar results came out of a study in which students of both sexes listened to the plight of a man who became homeless either because he had come down with an illness or because he had grown tired of working.
The team of psychologists then pushed the outside of the envelope by seeing how much sympathy they could induce for convicted murderers.61 It’s not that anyone necessarily wants people to develop warm feelings toward murderers. But at least some degree of sympathy for the unsympathetic may be necessary to oppose cruel punishments and frivolous executions, and we can imagine that a grain of sympathy of this sort may have led to the reforms of criminal punishment during the Humanitarian Revolution. Batson didn’t press his luck by trying to induce sympathy for a psychopathic predator, but he artfully invented a typical crime-blotter homicide in which the perpetrator had been provoked by a victim who was not much more likable than he was. Here is James’s story of how he came to kill his neighbor:Pretty soon, things went from bad to worse. He’d dump garbage over the fence into my back yard. I sprayed red paint all over the side of his house. Then he set fire to my garage with my car in it. He knew that car was my pride and joy. I really loved it and kept it in great shape. By the time I woke up and they got the fire out, the car was ruined—totaled! And he just laughed! I went crazy—not yelling; I didn’t say anything, but I was shaking so hard I could hardly stand up, I decided right then that he had to die. That night when he came home, I was waiting on his front porch with my hunting rifle. He laughed at me again and said I was chicken, that I didn’t have the guts to do it. But I did. I shot him four times; he died right there on the porch. I was still standing there holding the rifle when the cops came.
[Interviewer: Do you regret doing it?]
Now? Sure. I know that murder is wrong and that nobody deserves to die like that, not even him. But at the time all I wanted was to make him pay—big—and to get him out of my life. [Pause] When I shot him, I felt this big sense of relief and release. I felt free. No anger; no fear; no hate. But that feeling lasted only a minute or two. He was the one that was free; I was going to be in prison for the rest of my life. [Pause] And here I am.
The perspective-takers did feel a bit more sympathy for James himself than did the technical evaluators, but it translated into just a sliver of a more positive attitude toward murderers in general.
But then there was a twist on the twist. A week or two later the participants got a phone call out of the blue from a pollster who was doing a survey on prison reform. (The caller was in cahoots with the experimenters, but none of the students figured this out.) Tucked into the opinion poll was an item on attitudes toward murderers, similar to one in the questionnaire that the students had filled out in the lab. At this distance, the effects of perspective-taking made a difference. The students who had tried a couple of weeks before to imagine what James had been feeling showed a noticeable bump in their attitude toward convicted murderers. The delayed influence is what researchers in persuasion call a sleeper effect. When people are exposed to information that changes their attitudes in a way they don’t approve of—in this case, warmer feelings toward murderers—they are aware of the unwanted influence and consciously cancel it out. Later, when their guard is down, their change of heart reveals itself. The upshot of the study is that even when a stranger belongs to a group that people are strongly inclined to dislike, listening to his story while taking his perspective can genuinely expand their sympathy for him and for the group he represents, and not just during the few minutes after hearing the story.
People in a connected world are exposed to the stories of strangers through many channels, including face-to-face encounters, interviews in the media, and memoirs and autobiographical accounts. But what about the portion of their information stream that is set in make-believe worlds—the fictional stories, films, and television dramas in which audiences voluntarily lose themselves? The pleasure in a story comes from taking a character’s vantage point and in comparing the view to that from other vantage points, such as those of the other characters, of the narrator, and of the reader himself or herself. Could fiction be a stealthy way to expand people’s sympathy? In an 1856 essay George Eliot defended this psychological hypothesis:Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy readymade, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit’s cottage, or tells the story of “The Two Drovers,”—when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of “Poor Susan,”—when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw,—when Hornung paints a group of chimney-sweepers, —more is done towards linking the higher classes with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the grounds of our personal lot.62
Today the historian Lynn Hunt, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, and the psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley, among others, have championed the reading of fiction as an empathy expander and a force toward humanitarian progress.63 One might think that literary scholars would line up to join them, eager to show that their subject matter is a force for progress in an era in which students and funding are staying away in droves. But many literary scholars, such as Suzanne Keen in Empathy and the Novel, bristle at the suggestion that reading fiction can be morally uplifting. They see the idea as too middlebrow, too therapeutic, too kitsch, too sentimental, too Oprah. Reading fiction can just as easily cultivate schadenfreude, they point out, from gloating over the misfortunes of unsympathetic characters. It can perpetuate condescending stereotypes of “the other.” And it can siphon sympathetic concern away from the living beings who could benefit from it and toward appealing victims who don’t actually exist. They also note, correctly, that we don’t have a trove of good laboratory data showing that fiction expands sympathy. Mar, Oatley, and their collaborators have shown that
readers of fiction have higher scores on tests of empathy and social acumen, but that correlation doesn’t show whether reading fiction makes people more empathic or empathic people are more likely to read fiction.64
It would be surprising if fictional experiences didn’t have similar effects to real ones, because people often blur the two in their memories.65 And a few experiments do suggest that fiction can expand sympathy. One of Batson’s radio-show experiments included an interview with a heroin addict who the students had been told was either a real person or an actor.66 The listeners who were asked to take his point of view became more sympathetic to heroin addicts in general, even when the speaker was fictitious (though the increase was greater when they thought he was real). And in the hands of a skilled narrator, a fictitious victim can elicit even more sympathy than a real one. In his book The Moral Laboratory, the literary scholar Jèmeljan Hakemulder reports experiments in which participants read similar facts about the plight of Algerian women through the eyes of the protagonist in Malike Mokkeddem’s novel The Displaced or from Jan Goodwin’s nonfiction exposé Price of Honor.67 The participants who read the novel became more sympathetic to Algerian women than those who read the true-life account; they were less likely, for example, to blow off the women’s predicament as a part of their cultural and religious heritage. These experiments give us some reason to believe that the chronology of the Humanitarian Revolution, in which popular novels preceded historical reform, may not have been entirely coincidental: exercises in perspective-taking do help to expand people’s circle of sympathy.
The science of empathy has shown that sympathy can promote genuine altruism, and that it can be extended to new classes of people when a beholder takes the perspective of a member of that class, even a fictitious one. The research gives teeth to the speculation that humanitarian reforms are driven in part by an enhanced sensitivity to the experiences of living things and a genuine desire to relieve their suffering. And as such, the cognitive process of perspective-taking and the emotion of sympathy must figure in the explanation for many historical reductions in violence. They include institutionalized violence such as cruel punishments, slavery, and frivolous executions; the everyday abuse of vulnerable populations such as women, children, homosexuals, racial minorities, and animals; and the waging of wars, conquests, and ethnic cleansings with a callousness to their human costs.
At the same time, the research reminds us why we should not aim for an “age of empathy” or an “empathic civilization” as the solution to our problems. Empathy has a dark side.68
For one thing, empathy can subvert human well-being when it runs afoul of a more fundamental principle, fairness. Batson found that when people empathized with Sheri, a ten-year-old girl with a serious illness, they also opted for her to jump a queue for medical treatment ahead of other children who had waited longer or needed it more. Empathy would have consigned these children to death and suffering because they were nameless and faceless. People who learned of Sheri’s plight but did not empathize with her acted far more fairly.69 Other experiments make the point more abstractly. Batson found that in a Public Goods game (where people can contribute to a pool that gets multiplied and redistributed to the contributors), players who were led to empathize with another player (for example, by reading about how she had just broken up with her boyfriend) diverted their contributions to her, starving the public commonwealth to everyone’s detriment.70
The tradeoff between empathy and fairness is not just a laboratory curiosity; it can have tremendous consequences in the real world. Great harm has befallen societies whose political leaders and government employees act out of empathy by warmly doling out perquisites to kin and cronies rather than heartlessly giving them away to perfect strangers. Not only does this nepotism sap the competence of police, government, and business, but it sets up a zero-sum competition for the necessities of life among clans and ethnic groups, which can quickly turn violent. The institutions of modernity depend on carrying out abstract fiduciary duties that cut across bonds of empathy.
The other problem with empathy is that it is too parochial to serve as a force for a universal consideration of people’s interests. Mirror neurons notwithstanding, empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity. Though empathy can be spread outward by taking other people’s perspectives, the increments are small, Batson warns, and they may be ephemeral.71 To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.72
Nor is it necessary. The ideal of the expanding circle does not mean that we must feel the pain of everyone else on earth. No one has the time or energy, and trying to spread our empathy that thinly would be an invitation to emotional burnout and compassion fatigue.73 The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them.
What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need.
SELF-CONTROL
Ever since Adam and Eve ate the apple, Odysseus had himself tied to the mast, the grasshopper sang while the ant stored food, and Saint Augustine prayed “Lord make me chaste—but not yet,” individuals have struggled with self-control. In modern societies the virtue is all the more vital, because now that we have tamed the blights of nature most of our scourges are self-inflicted. We eat, drink, smoke, and gamble too much, max out our credit cards, fall into dangerous liaisons, and become addicted to heroin, cocaine, and e-mail.
Violence too is largely a problem of self-control. Researchers have piled up a tall stack of risk factors for violence, including selfishness, insults, jealousy, tribalism, frustration, crowding, hot weather, and maleness. Yet almost half of us are male, and all of us have been insulted, jealous, frustrated, or sweaty without coming to blows. The ubiquity of homicidal fantasies shows that we are not immune to the temptations of violence, but have learned to resist them.
Self-control has been credited with one of the greatest reductions of violence in history, the thirtyfold drop in homicide between medieval and modern Europe. Recall that according to Norbert Elias’s theory of the Civilizing Process, the consolidation of states and the growth of commerce did more than just tilt the incentive structure away from plunder. It also inculcated an ethic of self-control that made continence and propriety second nature. People refrained from stabbing each other at the dinner table and amputating each other’s noses at the same time as they refrained from urinating in closets, copulating in public, passing gas at the dinner table, and gnawing on bones and returning them to the serving dish. A culture of honor, in which men were respected for lashing out against insults, became a culture of dignity, in which men were respect
ed for controlling their impulses. Reversals in the decline of violence, such as in the developed world in the 1960s and the developing world following decolonization, were accompanied by reversals in the valuation of self-control, from the discipline of elders to the impetuousness of youth.
Lapses of self-control can also cause violence on larger scales. Many stupid wars and riots began when leaders or communities lashed out against some outrage, but come the next morning had reason to regret the outburst. The burning and looting of African American neighborhoods by their own residents following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, and Israel’s pulverizing of the infrastructure of Lebanon following a raid by Hezbollah in 2006, are just two examples.74
In this section I will examine the science of self-control to see if it supports the theory of the Civilizing Process, in the same way that the preceding section examined the science of empathy to see if it supported the theory of the expanding circle. The theory of the Civilizing Process, like Freud’s theory of the id and the ego from which it was derived, makes a number of strong claims about the human nervous system, which we will examine in turn. Does the brain really contain competing systems for impulse and self-control? Is self-control a single faculty in charge of taming every vice, from overeating to promiscuity to procrastination to petty crime to serious aggression? If so, are there ways for individuals to boost their self-control? And could these adjustments proliferate through a society, changing its character toward greater restraint across the board?