A World without Compassion

When the chimpanzees in Gombe National Park suffered an epidemic of poliomyelitis, probably contracted from people, the partially paralyzed victims were treated with fear, indifference, and hostility, as if they had ceased to belong to the community. According to Jane Goodall, Pepe met with the following reaction when he first showed up at camp, his useless arm trailing in the dust.

[The others] stared for a moment and then, with wide grins of fear, rushed for reassurance to embrace and pat each other, still staring at the unfortunate cripple. Pepe, who obviously had no idea that he himself was the object of their fear, showed an even wider grin of fright as he repeatedly turned to look over his shoulder along the path behind him

At first, healthy individuals avoided the polio victims because of their odd movements and dragging limbs. Next they directed charging displays at them; then they attacked.' Shunning grotesquely deformed individuals may be psychologically understandable (as well as adaptive, given the risk of infection), but it is one of many examples of the absence of compassion and mercy in a species in which at other times these very same qualities seem incipient. Brutal intercommunity violence observed between chimpanzees who in earlier years had peacefully traveled and groomed together, and the chimpanzee habit of tearing limbs and meat from prey animals who are still very much alive, such as a screaming colobus monkey, indicate that whatever inhibitions and sensitivities these apes possess, they are easily overruled by other interests.

The attitude toward members of one's own species should of course not be equated with that toward other species. Lack of concern for other species is to be expected, given the virtual absence of attachment. Animals often seem to regard those who belong to another kind as merely ambulant objects. Sue Boinsky reports that when an angry capuchin male in the wild ran out of ammunition while hurling things at her, he simply turned around, grabbed an unsuspecting squirrel monkey who sat nearby, and threw it at her as if it were just another branch. The capuchin, who would never have acted in this way with a member of his own species, clearly could not care less about the shrieking little monkeys with whom he shared the forest. Cruelty to other animals is something that we humans may have begun worrying about; it is a concern without precedent in nature. Hunters judge the hunted by caloric rather than emotional value, and even if other species are not perceived as food, usually nothing is to be gained by investing care in them.

On rare occasions interspecific contact takes a cruel turn. Consider the game in which youngsters entice chickens behind a fence with bread crumbs. When they come within reach, the gullible chickens are hit with a stick or poked in the feathers with a sharp piece of wire. This "tantalus" game, in which the chickens were stupid enough to cooperate, was described by Wolfgang Kohler for his chimpanzees. They played the game for amusement, not to get hold of the fowl, and refined it to the point that one ape would be the baiter and another the hit man. It lends further support to the claim of higher cognition in chimpanzees: in the same way that empathy may lead to sympathy if combined with attachment, it may result in intentional harm if combined with indifference.

We are ready now for a second German term, Schadenfreude, which is quite the opposite of Einfuhlung yet related to it for the same reason that sympathy and sadism are extremes that touch each other. Schadenfreude literally means "harm-joy." When people roll off their chairs laughing because Hardy falls into a barrel filled with glue while Laurel stupidly looks on, or because Chaplin gets slapped in the face by the object of his love, they are enjoying someone else's bad luck. The fact that so many comedians offer their audiences opportunities to express this type of glee indicates a deep-seated human urge to boost our self- esteem through the mishaps of others. We tend to conceal this emotion because in real life we experience it mainly in relation to people whom we do not like. The feeling probably derives from a sense of fairness: it is most predictably aroused if someone gets his comeuppance, as when a pompous or dishonest man loses his fortune. We do not feel Schadenfreude when the home of a poor family burns down, or when a child tumbles down the stairs, for these victims never threatened our self-worth.

Schadenfreude is the exact opposite of sympathy. Instead of sharing the pain of someone else, we get a kick out of it. Some of the most shocking, almost unbelievable, illustrations may be found in The Mountain People. Colin Turnbull describes an East African tribe, the Ik, who through starvation deteriorated to the point of dehumanization. All gaiety among the Ik seemed at the expense of others. They would shriek with laughter if someone fell, especially if weak or blind, or if an elder lost his food to roaming teenagers, who would go so far as to pry open the mouths of old people to pull out morsels that they had not yet swallowed. Harm to children was not exempted.

Men would watch a child with eager anticipation as it crawled towards the fire, then burst into gay and happy laughter as it plunged a skinny hand into the coals. Such times were the few times when parental affection showed itself: a mother would glow with pleasure to hear such joy occasioned by her offspring, and pull it tenderly out of the fire.

Turnbull never saw children more than three years old being fed by adults, and he observed that people ate away from their homes so as to avoid having to share the small quantities of food they had. Noting how pointless the quest for morality becomes under such inconceivable stress, and how nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of survival, the anthropologist cynically characterizes morality as "yet another luxury that we find convenient and agreeable and that has become conventional when we can afford it."

What intrigues me most in this depressing account is that when love and sympathy are wiped out by circumstances, apparently it is not mere selfishness that raises its head but an actual delight in the misery of others. Could it be that people derive pleasure from an equalization of fate, regardless of whether it is brought about by an uplifting or downward movement? When we are well off, we root for the underdogs and like to see their lot improve. Yet when we are at the border of starvation ourselves, we are glad to see every bit of misfortune around us, as it confirms that we are not the only ones down and out.

Whereas the possible link between sympathy and fairness has been little investigated, the connection with selfishness has received quite a bit of attention. Much of the philosophical literature, especially in the English-speaking world, has been marked by a juxtaposition of egoism and altruism. Rather than keeping alive the tension between these poles of sociality, there has been a tendency to come down on the side of the one or the other, usually the former. It must be obvious by now that I consider this paradigm rather sterile. The everything-is-egoism position is comparable to the claim that all life on earth is a conversion of sun energy. Both belong to the Great Truths of Science, yet in the same way that the second truth has never prevented us from recognizing the diversity of life, the first should not hold us back from making fundamental distinctions in the domain of motivation.

If I have a table full of food and you knock at my window, starving, I can invite you in and derive satisfaction from your happy face, or I can keep everything for myself and derive satisfaction from my own full belly. In both cases I may be called selfish; yet from your perspective, and that of society at large, it makes quite a difference which kind of self-interest I pursue. Also, the reward that I myself experience is altogether different in the two instances. Whereas most behavior is rewarded by how it affects the actor, acts of sympathy are rewarded by how the actor imagines that they affect the recipient. If this is selfishness, it happens to be the only kind that reaches out.

Experiments with human subjects by Robert Weiss and coworkers, in which the incentive for a response was the deliverance of another person from suffering, have confirmed that "the roots of altruistic behavior are so deep that people not only help others, but find it rewarding as well.'' The fact that satisfying feelings tend to accompany acts of sympathy does not in any way detract from their other directed nature if the only way to reap these rewards is via the other's well-being. When we calm a crying child, hugging and stroking him, we are not so much reassuring ourselves as we are the other. We monitor the impact of our behavior, and it fills us with immediate pleasure if the child laughs through his tears at a joke or a tickle. If human sympathy is indeed the "inborn and indestructible instinct" that David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, and others, declared it to be, it is only natural that it comes with a built-in compensation in the same way that sex and eating do.

With the feeling of sympathy so ingrained, it is only under the most extreme circumstances, as when people lose all means of subsistence or are packed together and starving in a concentration camp, that it dies. It becomes a thing of the past, a painful memory. An old Ik woman, to whom Turnbull had given some food, suddenly burst into tears because, as she said, it made her long for the "good old days" when people had been kind to one another. This common benevolence nourishes and guides all human morality. Aid to others in need would never be internalized as a duty without the fellow-feeling that drives people to take an interest in one another. Moral sentiments came first; moral principles, second.

Despite Immanuel Kant's opinion that kindness out of duty has greater moral worth than kindness out of temperament, if push comes to shove, sentiments win out. This is what the parable of the Good Samaritan is all about. A half-dead victim by the side of the road is ignored first by a priest, then by a Levite - both religious and ethically conscious men - yet receives care from the third passerby, a Samaritan. The biblical message is to be wary of ethics by the book rather than by the heart: only the Samaritan, a religious outcast, felt compassion.