Humans, Evolution, and the Universality of Empathy

Emotions were once thought to be a high order cognitive function associated with superior human capabilities.  Frans de Waal dispenses with that notion convincingly in his book Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves.  Simple animals have simple lives and instinctual responses in which a stimulus generates a programmed reaction often suffice to allow the species to survive long enough to propagate itself.  But as animals and their environments became more complicated a different type of mechanism was required.  Evolution developed emotions as a means of alerting the animal that a response was required, but the optimal response was not specified.  The emotion of fear, for example, automatically alters the body to prepare it to take action, but the course of action is determined by a decision based on the animal’s cognitive capabilities and its stored experiences.  The appearance of a dangerous predator would generate options for fight, flight, hide, or ignore, providing a more nuanced response than mere instinct.  The book was discussed more generally in The Human Animal: Emotions Are Critical in Animal Evolution.  Here, the focus will be on empathy.  What has been learned about it tells us much about ourselves and about other animals.

Empathy can be defined as the ability to interpret and share the feelings of another.  This emotion will clearly affect how animals interact with each other, but the empathic response is not predetermined.  Generally, this knowledge of another’s feelings will be used for pro-social results, but it can also be used to take advantage of another.  What de Vaal wishes to make perfectly clear is that the emotion of empathy is not restricted to humans, and that empathy is a physical phenomenon—our bodies are designed to participate in the process, and its activities often take place subconsciously.

One thing that research has made clear is that emotions are conveyed by facial expressions and animals are excellent at interpreting these signals, particularly within their own species.  Part of the mechanism of empathizing is the unconscious mimicking of observed expressions of another.

“The Swedish psychologist Ulf Dimberg identified the empathic connection within our own species in the 1990s, when he pasted electrodes onto human faces that allowed him to register even the tiniest muscle contractions.  He found that people automatically mimic the expressions shown them on a monitor.  Most remarkably, they don’t even need to know what they’re seeing.  The pictures of faces can be flashed subliminally (for only a fraction of a second) between pictures of landscapes, and people will still mimic them.  They think they are just looking at beautiful scenery, unaware of the faces on the screen, but they feel good or bad afterward depending on whether they were exposed to smiles or frowns.  Seeing smiles makes us happy, while seeing frowns makes us angry or sad.  Unconsciously, our facial muscles copy these faces, which then feeds back into how we feel.”

This facial mimicry turns out to be essential to the development of an empathetic response.

“The body is now front and center to any account of empathy.  New brain imaging studies support the involuntary physical process proposed by Dimberg.  And research has found that empathy suffers when facial mimicry is blocked, such as when human subjects hold a pencil between their teeth so that their cheek muscles can’t move.  Our faces are much more mobile than we think, which helps us connect with others by mimicking their movements.  This has become a problem for people whose faces have been injected with Botox.  Their muscle relaxation keeps them from mirroring the faces of others, which robs them of feeling what others feel.  Botoxed people may look wonderful, but they have trouble empathizing.”

People seem to derive satisfaction or pleasure from being imitated by others.  This includes the facial mimicry, but it also includes the mimicry of gestures, laughter and so on.

“Botoxed faces look frozen, missing the stream of micro-expressions employed in daily interactions.  Their facial unresponsiveness makes others feel cut off, rejected even.”

“Who hasn’t cried when others cried, laughed when others laughed, jumped for joy when others jumped.  We feel what others feel by making their postures, movements, and expressions our own.  Empathy jumps from body to body.”

Who hasn’t observed a mother and her infant staring into each other’s face, with the mother trying to elicit a smile from her baby?  Is the child being taught to smile, to mimic other’s faces, or are the two just having fun together?  De Vaal believes the mimicry is inherent and the mother is merely enjoying the moment.  He tells us that people who have been blind and deaf from birth will express emotions just as the rest of us do.  Empathic responses are observed in infants very early in life before any social prompting is likely.

“Emotional contagion, as it is known, begins at birth, such as when one baby cries upon hearing another baby cry.  On airplanes and in maternity wards, babies sometimes chorus like frogs.  You might think they cry in reaction to any kind of noise, but studies have shown they respond specifically to the cries of same-age babies.  Girl babies do so more than boy babies.  That the emotional glue of society emerges so early in life reveals its biological nature.  It is a capacity we share with all mammals.”

One of the most curious conclusions derived from observations of young animals is that they seem drawn to one of their own who appears to be in trouble.  This has been observed in mice and other animals.  De Vaal has observed this phenomenon in young monkeys.

“Once an infant accidently landed on a dominant female, who bit him.  He screamed so incessantly that he was soon surrounded by other infants.  I counted eight of them in the baby pile, all climbing on top of the poor victim, pushing, pulling, and shoving each other aside.  That obviously did little to alleviate the first infant’s fright.  But the monkeys’ response seemed automatic, as if they were just as distraught as the victim and sought to comfort themselves as much as the other.”

Limited understanding of “survival of the fittest” and natural selection led to the characterization of humans as being motivated by self-interest, but humans and many other animals are intensely social and usually altruistic when it comes to aiding others in distress, particularly when they are known to us.  If de Vaal’s monkeys were wired to be driven by self-interest, they should have recognized the distress of another as a sign of possible danger.  The safer thing to do would have been to seek the comfort of their mothers or to move away from the victim.

“It is as if nature has endowed children and many animals with a simple rule: ‘If you feel another’s pain, get over there and make contact!’  It is good to realize, however, that any theory of strict self-preservation would predict the exact opposite…That mice, monkeys, and many other animals actively seek out those in trouble…proves the fundamental flaw of the sociobiological theories popular in the 1970s and ‘80s.”

What was observed was the beginnings of empathic behavior which would persist and grow with maturity.

“The early development of this behavior has been studied in our species by filming children in their homes.  The investigator asks an adult family member to pretend to cry or act as if they are in pain, in order to see what the children do.  In the film the children look worried while approaching the distressed adult.  They gently touch, stroke, hug, or kiss the adult.  Girls do so more than boys.  The most important finding was that these responses emerge early in life, before the age of two.  That toddlers already express empathy suggests it is spontaneous, because it is unlikely that anyone has been instructing them how to proceed.

This attempt to provide comfort is common in other animals, and chimps respond in ways quite similar to humans.  An example is provided by Nadia Ladygina-Kohts of a pet chimp’s response to the perceived distress of his mistress.

“If I pretend to be crying, close my eyes and weep, Joni immediately stops his play or any other activities, quickly runs over to me, all excited and shagged, from the most remote places in the house, such as the roof or the ceiling of his cage, from where I could not drive him down despite my persistent calls and entreaties.  He hastily runs around me, as if looking for the offender; looking at my face, he tenderly takes my chin in his palm, lightly touches my face with his finger, as though trying to understand what is happening, and turns around, clenching his toes into firm fists.”

“Many animals, from dogs to rodents, and from dolphins to elephants, exhibit comforting behavior, even though each species uses its own gestures.  In fact, in the same homes where the children were filmed, the psychologists accidently discovered that dogs responded to the distressed person as well, putting their heads in their lap or licking their face.”

Empathy also expresses itself throughout our lives by tending towards pro-social behavior in which others are generally treated with kindness and respect unless there is a reason for not doing so.

“When people in a neuroimaging experiment were given a choice between a selfish and an altruistic option, most opted for the latter.  They went with the selfish choice only if there were good reasons to avoid cooperation.  Many studies support this view, saying that we tend to be kind and open to others unless something holds us back.”

It would seem that nature has intended us to develop into socialists.  Libertarianism appears to be a recent pathology that developed among humans.

“The default mode of the human primate is intensely social, as reflected in our favorite activities, from attending sports matches and singing in choirs to partying and socializing.  Given that we derive from a long line of group-loving animals, which survived by helping one another, these tendencies are entirely logical.  Going it alone has never worked out for us.”

The Virus That Is the Military-Industrial Complex

A virus is a small infectious agent constructed of genetic material.  It is capable of reproducing itself if it gains entry to the cell of a living entity.  Some viruses are so deadly it can quickly cause the death of its host.  Others cause little damage and are overcome by the host’s immune system responses.  Yet others escape these defenses and their presence causes long-term effects by stealing resources and altering the functionality of body organs.  These may cause tumors and spread cancerous growth.  Andrew Cockburn used the analogy of one of these latter viruses to describe the effect of the military-industrial complex (MIC) on US society.  His work appeared as The Military-Industrial Virus in Harper’s Magazine.

Cockburn’s virus analogy was prompted by a study of long-term military spending trends.  Wars would come and go; political upheavals would occur; yet defense spending kept rising at a more-or-less steady rate.  He quotes work from a persistent Pentagon critic, Chuck Spinny.

“The analysis that Spinney produced…revealed something intriguing: although the U.S. defense budget clearly increased and decreased over the sixty years following the end of the Korean War, the decreases never dipped below where the budget would have been if it had simply grown at 5 percent per year from 1954 on (with one minor exception in the 1960s). ‘Amazingly,’ emphasized Spinney, ‘this behavior even held true for the large budget reductions that occurred after the end of the Vietnam War and, more significantly, after the end of the Cold War. It is as if there is a rising floor of resistance, below which the defense budget does not penetrate’.”

Cockburn provided this example of the resiliency of the MIC.

“In 1960, for example, as President Eisenhower was getting ready to denounce the dangerous power of what he would christen the military-industrial complex, the growth rate was pressing against the 5 percent floor. On cue, there appeared the fraudulent specter of a ‘missile gap’ favoring the Soviets. The incoming Kennedy Administration duly opened the budgetary tap.”

Such examples prompted the virus analogy.

“This entire process, whereby spending growth slows and is then seemingly automatically regenerated, raises an intriguing possibility: that our military-industrial complex has become, in Spinney’s words, a ‘living organic system’ with a built-in self-defense reflex that reacts forcefully whenever a threat to its food supply—our money—­hits a particular trigger point. The implications are profound, suggesting that the MIC is embedded in our society to such a degree that it cannot be dislodged, and also that it could be said to be concerned, exclusively, with self-preservation and expansion, like a giant, malignant virus.”

The virus analogy requires that the military industrial complex is ultimately harmful to the nation.  Cockburn begins his article with this lede.

“How bloated defense budgets gut our armed forces”

For an explanation of how this harm comes about, Cockburn indicates a realization first pointed out by friend Spinny.

“In 1983, Chuck Spinney, a thirty-seven-year-old analyst in the Pentagon’s Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, testified to Congress that the cost of the ever-more complex weapons that the military insisted on buying always grew many times faster than the overall defense budget. In consequence, planes, ships, and tanks were never replaced on a one-to-one basis, which in turn ensured that the armed forces got smaller and older.”

If one had and needed two thousand planes of a specific type and wished to replace the older model with a newer “better” model, the replacement might be five times more expensive than the original, which meant the budget only supported perhaps a thousand new planes.  That required half a force of the older planes be maintained for many more years.  The dilemma is even more perverse if the newer model is less reliable than the old and does not function exactly as promised—as is often the case.  This realization led Cockburn to the following conclusion.

“…we’ve been left with a very poor fighting force for our money. The evidence for this is depressingly clear, starting with our bulging arsenal of weapons systems incapable of performing as advertised and bought at extraordinary cost. Some examples, such as the F-35 Lightning II fighter planes bought by the Air Force, Navy, and Marines, have achieved a certain muted notoriety and served as the occasional butt of jokes made by comedians on cable TV. Yet there is little public appreciation of the extent of the disaster. The F-35 first saw combat last year, seventeen years after the program began. The Marines sent just six of them on their first deployment to the Middle East, and over several months only managed to fly, on average, one combat sortie per plane every three days. According to the Pentagon’s former chief testing official, had there been opposition, these ‘fighters’ could not have survived without protection from other planes.”

“The beauty of the system lies in its self-­reinforcing nature. Huge cost overruns on these contracts not only secure a handsome profit for the contractor but also guarantee that the number of weapons acquired always falls short of the number originally requested. For example, the Air Force first planned to buy 750 ­F-22s at a projected cost of $139 million apiece, but rising costs compelled the defense secretary at the time, Robert Gates, to cancel the program in 2009, capping the fleet at 187. With reduced numbers, weapons systems are kept in service longer: the Air Force’s planes average twenty-eight years in service, and some still in use were built well over half a century ago. The ­F-35, for example, costs almost six times more than the ­F-16 it is replacing, while the Navy’s Zumwalt-­class destroyer ($7.5 billion each) costs four times more than the Arleigh Burke destroyers it was supposed to replace. (The Zumwalt’s overruns were so enormous that although the original plan called for thirty-two ships, production was cut to just three.) On occasion, the system reaches the ultimate point of absurdity when gigantic sums are expended with no discernible results. Such was the case with Future Combat Systems, a grandiose Army program to field ground forces of manned vehicles, robots, and assorted weaponry, all linked via electronic networks, and with Boeing as the prime contractor. Twenty billion dollars later, the enterprise was shuttered, an extensive exercise in futility.”

A characteristic of a virus is that it spreads as far as it can to ensure its survival.  The societal equivalent is how the MIC has ensured political support by spreading its contagion throughout the body politic.

“Major contractors have turned the distribution of defense contracts across as many congressional districts as possible into a high art. Contracts and subcontracts for Lockheed’s ­F-35, for example, are spread across 307 congressional districts in forty-­five states, thus ensuring the fealty of a commensurate number of congresspeople as well as ninety senators.”

Jobs creating defense programs are an enticement few politicians can resist.

“For example, the F-35 is due to be stationed in Vermont at Burlington International Airport, home of the Vermont Air National Guard. Because the ­F-35 is at least four times noisier than the ­F-16s it will replace, large swaths of the surrounding low-cost neighborhood, by the Air Force’s own criteria, will be rendered unfit for residential use, trapping some seven thousand people in homes that will only be sellable at rock-bottom prices. Nevertheless, the ­F-35 proposal enjoys political support from the state’s otherwise liberal elected leadership, notably Senator Bernie Sanders, who has justified his support on the grounds that, while he is opposed to the ­F-35, he supports its being stationed in Vermont from the perspective of job creation.”

As it turns out, growing jobs by defense spending is the least efficient approach.

“Yet deeper scrutiny indicates that defense contracts are not particularly efficient job generators after all. Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-­Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have calculated the number of jobs spawned by an investment of $1 billion in various industries, ranging from defense to health care, renewable energy, and education. Education came in first by a wide margin, producing 26,700 jobs, followed by health care at 17,200. Defense, generating 11,200 jobs, ranked last. ‘All economic activity creates some employment,’ Pollin told me. ‘That isn’t at issue. The relevant question is how much employment in the U.S. gets created for a given level of spending in one area of the economy as opposed to others.’ The fact is that defense spending generates fewer jobs than green energy, education, and other critical industries.”

The virus analogy also predicts that the infection will harm the functioning of our society.  Cockburn provides examples where the costly, overly complex, underperforming culture of the defense industry has spread to critical industries and caused damage.

“A generation ago, Seymour Melman, a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia, devoted much of his career to analyzing this very subject. He concluded that defense spending’s impact on the broader economy was wholly harmful, a consequence of the bad habits injected into the bloodstream of American manufacturing management by a defense culture indifferent to cost control and productivity. The U.S. machine-tool industry, for example, had powered postwar U.S. manufacturing dominance thanks to its cost-effective productivity that in turn allowed high wage rates for workers. But, Melman wrote, as more and more of its output shifted to defense contracts, the industry’s relationship with the Pentagon ‘became an invitation to discard the old tradition of cost minimizing. It was an invitation to avoid all the hard work . . . that is needed to offset cost increases. For now it was possible to cater to a new client, for whom cost and price increase was acceptable—­even desirable’.”

“In consequence, as Melman detailed, the U.S. machine-tool industry gradually ceased to compete effectively with nations such as Germany and Japan, where cost control still reigned supreme.”

A more recent example of infection comes from Boeing’s commercial aircraft woes.  It turns out Boeing realized that the consequences of an infection from its Boeing defense arm could be dangerous for its commercial products.  It maintained a barrier between the two internal organizations.  However, when it merged with McDonnell Douglas, a defense outfit, the defense arm gained more influence over the commercial sector.

“The two recent crashes of the Boeing 737 Max, which together killed 346 people, were further indications that running civilian programs along defense-­industry lines may not have been the best course for Boeing. The 737 had been a tried and true money-spinner with an impressive safety record since 1967…the airliner was modified in a rushed program to compete with the Airbus ­A320. These modifications, principally larger engines that altered the plane’s aerodynamic characteristics, rendered it potentially unstable. Without informing customers or pilots, Boeing installed an automated software Band-Aid that fixed the stability problem, at least when the relevant sensors were working. But the sensors were liable to fail, with disastrous consequences. Such mishaps are not uncommon in defense programs, one such instance being Boeing’s V-22 Osprey troop-carrying aircraft…in which a design flaw, long denied, led to multiple crashes that killed thirty-­nine soldiers and Marines. But the impact of such disasters on contractors’ bottom lines tends to be minimal, or even positive, since they may be paid to correct the problem. In the commercial market, the punishment in terms of lost sales and lawsuits are likely to be more severe.”

One attribute of a virus is that it can mutate into a more dangerous form and eventually kill its host.  Consider the fate of the Soviet Union laboring under the infection of its own military-industrial complex.

“In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, before tensions with Russia were reignited, the BDM Corporation, a major defense consulting group, received a Pentagon contract to interview former members of the Soviet defense complex, very senior officials either in the military or in weapons-­production enterprises. Among the interesting revelations that emerged (which included confirmation that U.S. intelligence assessments of Soviet defense policy had been almost entirely wrong throughout the Cold War) was an authoritative account of how disastrous the power of the military-­industrial complex had been for Soviet defense and the economy. BDM learned that ‘the defense-­industrial sector used its clout to deliver more weapons than the armed services asked for and to build new weapons systems that the operational military did not want.’ A huge portion of Soviet industrial capacity was devoted just to missile production. ‘This vast industrial base,’ according to one former high-ranking bureaucrat, ‘destroyed the national economy and pauperized the people.”

Beware the short-term trap of focusing on jobs above all else.

“Calls for cuts in this unnecessary production were dismissed by the Kremlin leadership on grounds of ‘what would happen to the workers.’ The unbearable burden of the Soviet military-industrial complex was undoubtedly a prime cause of the ultimate collapse of the Soviet state—the virus had consumed its host.”

The goal of a virus is survival.  Nothing else matters. 

“The BDM contract had been issued in the belief that it would confirm a cherished Pentagon thesis that the sheer magnitude of U.S. spending, particularly the huge boost initiated in the Reagan years, had brought down the Soviets by forcing them to try to compete—­a welcome endorsement for mammoth defense budgets. But the ongoing BDM project, even before the researchers finished their work, made it clear this was not what had happened; the Soviet burden was entirely self-­generated for internal reasons, such as maintaining employment. When Pentagon officials realized that BDM’s research was leading toward this highly unwelcome conclusion, the contract was abruptly terminated. The system knows how to defend itself.”

Creating History: Evangelism and Slavery

Adam Hochschild is well-known and respected journalist and writer.  He refers to himself occasionally as a “public historian,” by which is meant someone who studies history in order convey it to the general public, rather than publish for the benefit of other historians.  Public historians, as ones who can possibly acquire a large audience, then have an even greater responsibility for their actions because history, or its interpretation, is critical to current events.  Similarly, current events are critical to the interpretation of history.  The stories we choose to tell about ourselves are rooted in historical interpretation, and those stories will influence the politics of today.  Controlling history is a good way to control politics.  To quote William Faulkner: “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”

Hochschild discusses issues related to historical interpretation in his collection of essays: Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays.

“But the longer that I work with the past, the more I realize that it is not unchangeable at all.  What we see when we look at something that happened, say, two hundred years ago is very different from the way people remembered exactly the same thing fifty or a hundred years ago.  These shifts take place not because previously hidden sources of information are newly discovered but because of events in the ever-changing present.”

The changes in historical perspectives may not be arbitrary.  Often, they are part of a concerted effort to rewrite history for political gain.  The most egregious example comes from the Soviet era in Russia, where librarians had to maintain a long and detailed history of the communist era.  The task was complicated by the fact that the government would send out frequent modifications as current events made reporting of previous events “inconvenient.”  New pages would be sent out to replace old pages.  Hochschild reports a bit of Soviet humor from those days.

“The joke in Soviet days when you spoke with people who were trying to study history was ‘You never know what will happen…yesterday’.”

Such manipulation of history is ongoing today.

“Around the world, not just the present but the past has become a battleground.  Those right-wingers were in Charlottesville to protest a plan to remove a statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee.  In Hungary, a German ally in the Second World War, monuments have been installed and museum exhibits altered to portray Hungarians, not Jews, as victims of the Nazis.  In the 1990s, many Russians told me of their hope that a few of the old Soviet labor camps could be preserved or restored as memorials to those who had died and reminders that such events must never happen again.  Instead, at the only place where a restoration has been completed, near Perm, in the Ural Mountains, the camp has become a site of pilgrimage for enthusiastic followers of Vladimir Putin who want to celebrate the glorious days of Stalin’s rule.”

Hochschild presents a recent example of the perversion of the historical record for political gain in an article titled Sunday School History (originally published in 2007).  In it he describes how those who propagated religious justifications for the existence of slavery in the United States, who supported a century of Jim Crow laws in the American South, and who have embraced the racism and white nationalism of Donald Trump, have worked to give credit for the end of slavery in England to one William Wilberforce.

“From the mid-1700s on, roughly half the captive Africans taken to the Americas in chains were transported by ships based in Liverpool, Bristol, London, and a e few other English ports.  And so when England abolished its Atlantic slave trade in 1807, it was a historic turning point.  Parliament’s votes to end the ocean traffic in human beings and then, a quarter century later, to end British slavery itself—which affected, above all, those who worked the lucrative sugar plantations in the British West Indies—have long fascinated historians, because the country acted against its economic self-interest.”

“For many years, almost all the credit for ending the slave trade and British slavery was given to William Wilberforce, the eloquent, widely respected leader of abolitionist forces in the House of Commons and a convert to the evangelical strain of Anglicanism.  Centering the story on Wilberforce offered great comfort.  It allowed Britons to acknowledge that their ancestors had been involved in something horrendous, while at the same time giving Wilberforce credit for inspiring an unprecedented act of national benevolence.”

In 1933, one hundred years after his death, England marked Wilberforce’s contributions with a significant level of pageantry.

“Several dozen biographies of Wilberforce have appeared since then, almost all of them by evangelicals, with such titles as God’s Politician, A Hero for Humanity, Statesman and Saint, and The Man Who Freed the Slaves.”

“Many American politicians of the Christian right have adopted Wilberforce as a model…Mike Pence…calls Wilberforce one of his personal heroes, often quotes him, and has declared that Wilberforce’s ‘words hold equally true to abortion as they do to slavery.’  Congressman Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, says, ‘If we can get the word out about Wilberforce’s life and legacy, we can change this country.’…Sam Brownback of Kansas talks about the man so much that the Economist recently dubbed him and others ‘Wilberforce Republicans’.”

Hochschild does not deny the role Wilberforce played in the House of Commons, but the adulation of him disregards the decades of effort provided by ardent abolitionists, as well as historical events that suggested the economic viability of slavery was coming to an end.  All of this took place independent of Wilberforce and his speeches in Parliament.  The years 1787 and 1788 are identified with the beginning of a strong grass-roots movement against both the slave trade and slavery itself.  It resulted in a new form of political organization which resembles the way movements are organized today.  There was a central headquarters in London and satellite offices distributed around the country.  Religious leaders, mainly Quakers and Anglicans coordinated with each other and a multiracial array of abolitionists.  Activists like Thomas Clarkson spent years travelling the country organizing and recruiting other activists.  Two former slaves, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano wrote books about their experiences and travelled the country promoting abolition.  The ill treatment of England’s workers was compared to the ill treatment of slaves leading to calls for the end of slavery “both at home and abroad.”

“In 1792, more Britons signed petitions to Parliament against the slave trade than were eligible to vote.  In the same year, more than three hundred thousand people refused to buy slave-cultivated West Indian sugar.  This was the largest consumer boycott the world had yet seen, and it was driven by women, for they were the ones who did the household food shopping.  British women had no vote, and the boycott was their first mass political act.  Without boycott, petitions, and other popular pressure, Wilberforce could have done nothing in Parliament.”

The final blow to the slave industry might have been both economic and military in nature.

“A further force behind the ending of British slavery, today widely recognized at last, was a long string of West Indian slave revolts, which intensified during the 1790s.  The Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803 was the greatest slave uprising in history.  First, the slaves successfully threw off their French masters.  Two years later, Britain, at war with France, tried to seize for itself this most populous and lucrative of all Caribbean territories.  After five years of hard fighting against the former slaves, British troops gave up and pulled out.  Britain’s army fought rebellions elsewhere in the Caribbean as well during this period and several officers came home from these campaigns to write and speak…against slavery.  A later revolt by some twenty thousand slaves in Jamaica in 1831-1832 was only barely contained by the British army after five weeks of fighting, and military officers and colonial and plantation officials testified before Parliament that more revolts were likely.  It was no coincidence that in 1833 Parliament voted to free the empire’s slaves.”

When the hundred-year anniversary of the end of the slave trade came in 1907, the white, male-dominated nation barely noticed.  By the time 2007 came around Britain was a different place.  It had become a modern multiracial, multicultural nation and the commemorating events were plentiful.  What draws Hochschild’s interest is a movie produced for the event with the title Amazing Grace taken from that of the famous hymn.  It was the blatant attempt to define history as evangelicals would like it to be that moved him to write his article.  Consider John Newton who wrote that hymn.

“…in the publicity material sent to film critics, the makers of Amazing Grace say: ‘Newton was captain of a slave ship for many years, until he underwent a dramatic religious conversion while steering his vessel through a storm.  Repenting and regretting the misery he had inflicted on the thousands of human cargo he had transported across the Middle Passage…he devoted his life to the Church.”

“The reality was starkly, embarrassingly different.  Most inconveniently for sin-and-repentance storytellers, John Newton was converted to evangelical Christianity before making four transatlantic voyages as a slave-ship officer, not afterward.  He left the trade for reason not of conscience but of health.  And when he was later ordained a minister, he still had all his savings invested with his former employer, who had a fleet of slave ships on the ocean.  Newton said not a word in public against the slave trade for more than thirty years after he left the sea, during much of which time he was the most famous evangelical preacher in England.”

Newton would eventually speak out against the slave trade, but not until he had no other choice but to do so.  The treatment of Wilberforce in the film is equally misleading.  While he was definitely against slavery and argued for its end, he was merely an observer of all the developments taking place around him that made his goal attainable.

“It gives the impression that William Wilberforce brought the slave trade to an end almost single-handedly.  A biography published as the official companion to the movie calls Wilberforce ‘simply the greatest social reformer in the history of the world’.”

“In years past, lionizers of Wilberforce have painted that rosy picture by simply leaving out other parts of the story, like the slave rebellions.  Amazing Grace does so with far more subtlety and sophistication.  It gives short glimpses of some of the other important people and events—Clarkson’s epic travels, Equiano’s book tour, the sugar boycott, the mass petition campaigns.  But it implies, completely falsely, that Wilberforce orchestrated or supported all of these.”

Hochschild suggests that the talented producers of the film produced their inaccurate product at the urging of Philip Anschutz, who is described as “the movie’s principle financier.”

“A major backer of the evangelical Right, Anschutz has also been a significant donor to George W. Bush and to groups opposing everything from gay rights to abortion to the teaching of evolution.”

But why is Wilberforce so important to the evangelicals?  Have they no other example to call forth?  Hochschild provides this suggestion.

“This is the message the film wants us to carry away: that God’s work is best done by a wealthy, virtuous man like Wilberforce, who is against slavery and various forms of sin but questions nothing else in the social and political order.”

If Wilberforce is the example evangelicals wish to hold up for admiration, consider that while he was against slavery, that does not mean he was in favor of racial justice.  He was also against workers’ rights, against voters’ rights, against women’s rights, and presumably, would be against any of the other rights under contention in our day.  Wilberforce was a man of his time; he thought a few wealthy white men should be the ones allowed to make all the decisions.  In other words, he was similar to the politicians evangelical leaders are supporting today. 

Two hundred years have passed since Wilberforce’s time, but the evangelical Right has hardly noticed.

The Human Animal: Emotions Are Critical in Animal Evolution

For many years, scientists struggled to maintain a barrier between humans and other animals.  There must remain something magical, something inherently superior about humans that was lacking in lesser beasts.  Experiments and studies were conducted in order to conserve that preconception.  But time and a massive tide of new data from a more recent generation of scientists have begun to wash away that barrier, revealing that while humans may be superior in some ways, it is by a matter of degree, not by a fundamental difference.  Frans de Waal is one of the scientists who has been performing the required studies and reporting the results for consumption by a broad, nontechnical audience.  His most recent effort is titled Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves.  Emotions were once considered an example of a higher order cognitive response that was available to humans, but largely lacking in other species.  De Waal’s purpose is to convince us that emotions are not only common among animals, but that emotional response has been a part of natural selection since quite early in animal evolution.  Human emotional makeup, and that of a chimp for example, both result from the same evolutionary path that extended many millions of years into the past.

It was once thought that animal behavior was mainly instinctual.  Certain stimuli produce certain responses.  It only takes a few minutes of thought to conclude that such a mechanism is insufficient for the complex environments in which animals live.  De Waal uses as an example a male in search of female with whom to have sex.  When a desirable female is spotted instinct would tell him to approach and attempt to copulate with her.  In a real situation, the female may not be interested and could violently object to his approach.  She may already have a mate who is much bigger and stronger and might tear him limb from limb.  Our instinctive klutz is in need of something that arouses the desire to mate with a female in sight but provides a mechanism by which experience and conscious thought can intervene before action is taken.  That is the role emotions have played in evolution.

“Emotions have the great advantage over instincts that they don’t dictate specific behavior.  Instincts are rigid and reflex-like, which is not how most animals operate.  By contrast, emotions focus the mind and prepare the body while leaving room for experience and judgement.  They constitute a flexible response system far and away superior to the instincts.  Based on millions of years of evolution, the emotions ‘know’ things about the environment that we as individuals don’t always consciously know.  This is why the emotions are said to reflect the wisdom of ages”

De Waal is always pleased to point out that some emotional response in a human is often reproduced in other species in order to support the notion that we are all kin.  One example is a fear response in humans that directs the flow of blood from our extremities to our interior.  This means our extremities get colder when we experience the emotion of fear.  We literally get “cold feet.”  The exact same response has been observed in other apes, and even in rats.

Emotions are intimately coupled with bodily responses, and body conditions can also affect emotional response.  Significantly, emotion is usually expressed in some visual manner that conveys to an observer knowledge of the emotion being experienced.  This seems to be purposeful result of natural selection.  Humans are a social animal.  It appears evolution has decided that social animals are more effective as a society if members have some way of interpreting the emotions other members are experiencing. 

Humans have many facial expressions that convey emotion.  Evolution has provided us with the muscles we can use to produce very nuanced expressions.  It was long thought that this presumed unique complexity was consistent with higher order human intelligence and sociability.  However, chimpanzees have the exact same number of muscles and nearly the same muscular topology as humans.

“When a team of behavioral scientists and anthropologists finally tested the idea by carefully dissecting the faces of two dead chimpanzees, they found the exact same number of mimetic muscles as in the human face—and surprising few differences.  We could have predicted this, of course, because Nikolaas Tulp, the Dutch anatomist immortalized in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson, had long ago reached a similar conclusion.  In 1641 Tulp was the first to dissect an ape cadaver and found it resembled the human body so closely in its structural details, musculature, organs, and so on, that the species looked like two drops of water.”

Darwin was the first to recognize the similarities in expressions between humans and other primates.

“We have thus returned to Charles Darwin’s position in his 1872 book The

Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.  Darwin stressed that facial expressions are part of our species repertoire and pointed out similarities with monkeys and apes, suggesting that all primates have similar emotions.  It was a landmark book—acknowledged by everyone in the field today—but it was the only major book by Darwin that, after its initial success, was promptly forgotten, then overlooked for almost a century before we returned to it.  Why?  Because hard-core scientists felt his language was too free and anthropomorphic….Moreover, his suggestion that we convey our own noble sensibilities through facial movements that we share with ‘lower’ animals was roundly insulting.”

There now exists much evidence of the fact that facial expressions are tightly coupled to emotions, that within a species the coupling is nearly unique, and that human emotional expressions are similar to those of our primate kin.  De Waal refers to the work of Paul Ekman in categorizing facial expressions.

“Ekman set up controlled tests with people from more than twenty different nations, showing them pictures of emotional faces.  All these people labeled human expressions more or less the same way, showing little variation in recognizing anger, fear, happiness, and so on.  A laugh means the same all over the world.”

To test whether this similarity could have been spread culturally rather than biologically, Ekman had to test people with little or no communication with the wider world.

“He travelled to one of the farthest corners of the planet to administer his tests to a preliterate tribe in Papua New Guinea.  Not only had these people never heard of John Wayne or Marilyn Monroe, they were unfamiliar with television and magazines, period.  Yet they still correctly identified most of the emotional faces that Ekman held in front of them, and they themselves showed no novel, unusual expressions in one hundred thousand feet of motion pictures of their daily lives.”

There was one more attempt to nail down the biological nature of emotions and their expression.

“If it is true that the environment shapes facial expressions, then children who are born blind and deaf should show no expressions at all, or only strange ones, because they have never seen the faces of people around them.  Yet in studies of these children, they laugh, smile, and cry in the same way and under the same circumstances as any typical child.  Since their situation excludes learning from models, how could anyone doubt that emotional expressions are part of biology.”

Given this notion of emotions being biological constructs, de Wall generalized that finding to conclude that emotions should be thought of as a body organ. All vertebrates have essentially the same set of organs, and all are required to function if the specimen is to live.  Similarly, emotions have specific functions and they are necessary for proper functioning.

“First, as we have seen here for pride, shame, guilt, revenge, gratefulness, forgiveness, hope, and disgust, we can’t exclude their presence in other species.  These emotions may be more developed in us, or they may be used under a wider range of circumstances, but they aren’t fundamentally new.  That some human cultures emphasize some of them more than others hardly argues against a biological origin.”

“Second, it is highly unlikely that any common emotion is functionless.  Given the cost of getting all worked up and passionate about something, and given how much such states affect decision making, superfluous emotions would pose an incredible burden.  They might lead us astray, which is certainly not the sort of baggage natural selection would let us carry.  Hence my proposal that all emotions are both biological and essential.  None is more basic than the others, and none are uniquely human.  To me, this is a logical position given how closely the emotions are tied to the body and how all mammalian bodies are fundamentally the same.  Thus when human subjects were asked to guess the state of emotional arousal of a variety of reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and other land animals, just from listening to their calls, they were remarkably good at doing so.  There seem to exist ‘acoustic universals’ that allow all vertebrates to communicate emotions in similar ways.”

Discussion of emotions in terms of how we understand them as humans and how they are also utilized by other animals can be enlightening as to their functionality.  Consider the role of laughter as an expression of emotional state.  It has a definite physical manifestation, and its basic function is to provide social signals not to enjoy jokes.

“When we laugh, we go crazy.  We become limp, we lean on each other, we turn red, and we shed tears to the point of dissolving the dividing line with crying.  We literally pee in our pants!  After an evening of laughter, we are totally exhausted.  This is partly because intense laughter is marked by more exhalations (producing sound) than inhalations (taking in oxygen) so we end up gasping for air.  Laughter is one of the great joys of being human, with well known health benefits such as stress reduction, stimulation of heart and lungs, and release of endorphins.”

The social origins of laughter become more apparent when we observe the role it plays in bonding between parent and infant.

“The earliest laughter in our lives always occurs in a nurturing context, as it does in the other primates.  A gorilla mother tickles the belly of her tiny baby with her big finger just a few days after birth, producing the very first laugh.  In our own species, mothers and babies have lots of exchanges, in which they pay attention to every shift in each other’s expression and voice, with ample smiling and laughter.”

Mothers seem peculiarly interested in extracting laughter and juicy kisses from their infants.  The tickling response is curiously universal in humans and primates (and even in rats).  There must be some evolutionary function involved that is not obvious in our current human environment. 

“Tickling a juvenile chimpanzee is a lot like tickling a child.  The ape has the same sensitive spots: under the arm pits, on the side, in the belly.  He opens his mouth wide, lips relaxed, panting audibly in the same familiar huh-huh-huh rhythm of inhalation and exhalation as human laughter.  The striking similarity makes it hard not to giggle yourself.”

“The ape also shows the same ambivalence as a child.  He pushes your fingers away, protecting its ticklish spots while trying to escape from you, but as soon as you stop, he comes back for more, putting his belly right in front of you.  At this point, you need only point to it, not even touching it, and he will throw another fit of laughter.”

There is a possible explanation for the importance of teaching infants to laugh beyond that of bonding with a parent that de Waal ignores.  Humans spent most of their existence as subsistence hunter-gatherers.  If an infant is to survive it must be able to attract others who would be willing to care for it while its mother goes about fetching food.  A smiling and laughing baby, even in our day, garners more attention and affection than a crying, unhappy one.  Mothers in modern hunter-gatherer societies have been observed to paint their infants with colorful patterns in hopes of attracting childcare.  Some have even been known to give their child an enema so the friend providing assistance will not have to deal with a bowel movement.  Chimp mothers solve the problem by having hairy bodies to which their infants can cling to while they gather food.  But even chimp mothers will occasionally need assistance from others.  Mothers often band together to protect each other’s children from a male who might want to kill one in order to send the mother back into estrus so the male can bear an infant of its own.  It is always in an infant’s best interest to generate affection as widely as possible.

All the kissing that mothers like to do with their babies probably is associated with a deep memory of the time when solid food had to be prechewed and salivated by the mother and transmitted to the child mouth to mouth.

Laughter has important social functions that have nothing to do with humor.  The purpose of play in juveniles is to practice using their bodies and acquire skills that will be useful in adulthood.  Often such skills involve hunting and taking down prey, so the play can get rough.  Such animals develop “play signals” so actions that appear threatening can be labeled as playful rather than providing real danger.

“Animal play can be rough, as players may wrestle, gnaw, jump on top of each other, and drag each other around.  Without an unambiguous signal to clarify their intentions, play behavior might be mistaken for a fight.  Play signals tell others that they have nothing to worry about, that none of this is serious.  For example, dogs may ‘play bow’ (crouch down on their forelimbs with their butt in the air) to help set play apart from conflict.  But as soon as one dog misbehaves and accidently bites the other, play ceases abruptly.  A new play bow will be required as ‘apology’ so the victim can overlook the offense and resume play.”

“Laughter serves the same purpose: it puts other behavior into context.  One chimp pushes another firmly to the ground and puts his teeth in her neck, leaving her no escape, but since both utter a constant stream of hoarse laughs, they stay totally relaxed.  They know that this is just for fun.”

Laughter serves the same function in playing human children, but it can also be used to change the context of words and actions in many social settings.

“…if I approach a colleague and slap him on the shoulder with a laugh, he will perceive it quite differently than he would if I did so without a sound or without any expression on my face…Laughing reframes what we say or do and takes the sting out of potentially offensive remarks, which is why we use it all the time, even when nothing particularly amusing is going on.”

“When psychologists unobtrusively take notes on human behavior in shopping malls and on the sidewalks of our natural habitat, they find that the majority of laughs occur after mundane statements that are anything but amusing.  Try it yourself.  Notice when people laugh in spontaneous chit-chat, and you’ll see that it’s often about nothing at all—no joke, no pun, no odd remark.  It’s just a laugh inserted in the flow of conversation, usually echoed by the partner.  Humor is not central to laughter: social relationships are.  Our supernoisy, barklike displays announce mutual liking and well-being.  The laughter of a group of people broadcasts solidarity and togetherness, not unlike the howling of a pack of wolves.”

“The loud volume of our species’s laughter gets me every time: apes laugh much more softly, and monkeys can hardly be heard at all.  My guess is that loudness is inversely proportional to predation risk.”

What is most striking about de Waals numerous discussions about emotions and emotional responses is that we, and our kin, the primates, are intensely social animals and our brains and bodies were designed by nature to help us be a successful social animal.  To be what a libertarian claims to be seems a form of psychopathy, and a society of libertarians seems a contradiction in terms.

The title of de Waals book is taken from a video of Mama, an aged ape, who only has a few days left to live.  Mama was once the alpha female in a colony of chimps that lived in captivity.  One of the scientists studying the chimps, Jan van Hooff, had been interacting with Mama for over forty years.  A bond of affection and friendship had formed between them.  The intensity of that relationship became apparent when van Hooff made a last visit just before she died.  On the video it takes Mama a bit of time to realize that she has a visitor, but when she does, her response is one that is easily deciphered by we humans.  The video is worth a look.  It can be found here.

The interested reader might find the following articles informative:

Are Humans Inherently Warlike?

Mate Choice and Human Evolution

What if Ancient Humans Designed Themselves to Be Lovers—Not Warriors?