We humans are a strange apex predator. On a purely physical level, pretty much every other apex predator could kick our butts. Sharks? Can dismantle us. Grizzly bears? Whew, no contest. Gorillas? Would stomp us into the ground.
People like to say that intelligence is what sets humans apart, and yes, our intelligent tool use—and our ability to pass it on to subsequent generations is pretty cool. But I actually think that one of the most powerful things about humans is that we are, unlike many apex predators, incredibly social. (There are other social apex predators, like orcas and lions and wolves, for the record. This isn’t unique to humans.) We actually function best as a group. We collectively use our intelligent tool capacity to make sure that enough of us stay alive so that when any one of our weak, slow, hairless bodies malfunction, we can get better and then in turn help someone else, and that is incredibly powerful.
This is a thing that is buried pretty deep in us both socially and biologically: to look at another human (or mouse, or bird, or horse) in need and to think, “gosh, I should help them.” This is a force that causes us to move governments and change worlds. It leads us to better the world and look for ways to end suffering.
Like all powerful forces, it must be carefully managed. Reading historical literature is an exercise in watching how closely we tried to manage and divert people’s capacity for empathy. Chattel slavery in the US was justified by telling white people that Black people were unable to provide for themselves where they were (patently false; they’d obviously been doing it for millennia), and so it was kindness to take charge of them. They justified the brutality necessary to enslave people by insisting that Black people did not feel pain the same way. The empathy that we naturally hold for each other had to be reprogrammed, so that people learned to hold it in abeyance and think, “no, really, this is for the best.”
Abolitionists combatted this by having formerly enslaved people speak of their experiences—to shock people into turning their empathy back on, to deprogram them, to force them to come face to face with someone else’s humanity, because at our core, we are incredibly social creatures, and we are not designed to ignore each other’s suffering.
I have been thinking about empathy for a while now. I think some people talk about the times we are in as an absence of empathy, and I don’t think that’s quite right. I think we live in a time of highly selective empathy.
We got here, in fact, in part by preying on people’s sense of empathy. The talk of “criminals,” was designed to make people think that there are victims who deserve our empathy, and our desire to reduce suffering will be met by punishing criminals (who do not deserve our empathy). I do not actually think that many people have wholly turned off their empathy (although obviously some people have). I believe they’ve learned to apply it selectively.
This selective application of empathy is what causes humans to do the worst they have ever done: to believe the harm done to THIS group is meaningless (because they deserve it, or perhaps are incapable of feeling), while insisting that any harm done to the people in OUR group is paramount.
I am not sure how to get people to unselect their empathy: to say, “no, this feeling that people should not suffer belongs to everyone.” But the task feels like it is of incredible importance in the moment.
