Rage and Empathy

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

”Thank Heaven for little girls!”, Maurice Chevalier (singing, with strong French accent), in the movie Gigi (1958)

In some ways, human civilization is a paradox. Our species’ biological evolution is perpetually at war not just with our Reason, but with our civilization itself, which derives from our much shorter social evolution.

In past essays (see this post and this one), I’ve described two big battles in this perennial war. The first concerns sexual lust.

Feelings of lust are strong in us, particularly in males. Yet civilization demands that we control, suppress and manage lust in order to have a stable civilization at all.

When we were apes on the African savannah, males’ lust allowed a strong alpha male to take a “harem” of females against their will, or from other males. That taking allowed a stronger male’s genes to be passed on, increasing the species’ chances of surviving.

That evolutionary strategy worked well when nascent human “civilization” was confined to small clans of thirty or fewer individuals, each led by an alpha male tyrant. But in a twenty-first century civilization of nation-states with hundreds of millions of individuals, and a nascent global civilization now approaching seven billion, it’s a recipe for chaos.

And so we have laws against rape and sexual assault, and laws and customs regulating marriage and child-bearing. These are products of our social evolution. Our entire recorded history of less than 10,000 years is far too short for any similar change in our biological evolution, the more so as our civilization has slowed natural selection down. But as the “Me Too” movement attests, our laws and customs restraining lust are constantly evolving socially.

The second way in which our biological evolution wages war against our civilization involves leadership. Biologically, we evolved in small clans of thirty or fewer individuals led by an alpha male. The alpha male ruled by open violence, just as he still does among many apes and other animal species today. This evolutionary paradigm persisted through the age of monarchy, as kings—very seldom queens—ruled by force, or were “selected” through assassination or war.

In today’s age of mammoth nation-states, that evolutionary instinct, too, is a recipe for chaos. Hereditary monarchy once put entire nations at hazard, as the roulette wheel of human chromosomes, rather than Reason or any social choice, set the skill and character of the next leader. Later, modern weapons and other instruments of tyranny put monstrous leaders like Hitler and Stalin in charge of powerful nations, with disastrous effects for human civilization. Millions of individuals perished violently and in concentration camps.

One answer to these horrors was democracy, in which our species decides collectively who rules. Another answer is the modern bureaucratic state, in which stable institutions do most of the governing, under well-respected and stable laws and customs.

During the twentieth century, the United States had its feet planted firmly in both the democratic and technocratic-bureaucratic camps. But now it’s drifting away from both, back toward a disguised form of tyranny, with practically every selection of a recent new president (Obama excluded). We Americans, too, seem to have an atavistic yearning for our biological-evolutionary past and a strong alpha-male leader.

China is drifting in the same direction, although China has never had anything like Western democracy. Xi Jinping has made himself China’s latest emperor in all but name. He’s now in the process of replacing the Communist Party’s nascent technocratic bureaucracy (an echo of the Emperors’ old Mandarin bureaucracy) with one-man rule.

These species-wide retrogressions are possible only because social evolution proceeds infinitely faster than biological evolution. Like all evolution, social evolution proceeds in fits and starts, three steps forward and two steps back. Despite the veneer of civilization and the rule of law, our biologically evolved selves are always lurking in the background, ready to leap out and take over at times of social and political stress.

This essay concerns yet a third field of conflict between our biological and social evolution: the perennial struggle between rage and empathy. Rage is an evolutionary force that helps the individual survive. It triggers an adrenalin-fueled fighting spirit, both in conflicts with members of other species, and in conflicts within our own.

But today our human species has utterly dominated our small planet. So the inter-species advantages of rage are superfluous and becoming vestigial. We have no serious predators, and we no longer have to hunt for our dinners. Instead, factory-like slaughterhouses give us meat, and peaceful agriculture gives us bread, without the need for any individual human predation called “hunting.” Hunting is now a “sport,” not a necessity for survival.

So today rage affects us mostly in conflicts within our own species, i.e., in war and politics. But in the nuclear age, war can spell species self-extinction. Or it might reproduce the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in continental-scale horrors.

So rage, just like lust and the “divine rights” of kings, has outlived its biological evolutionary function. It must be replaced by social evolution, i.e., laws and customs that actually work in practice, in order for our species to survive and advance.

Enter empathy. It’s the polar opposite of rage. It evokes sympathy and understanding of other people, even those with opposing interests and points of view. It avoids, prevents and can resolve conflict. In extreme cases, such as Nelson Mandela’s “miracle,” it can liberate an entire people (defined by race) from oppression merely by negotiating from within a prison cell.

Empathy is the glue that holds civilization together. Rage is the fuel of war. It takes only a moment’s thought to decide which would better support our enormous global civilization as it grows to seven billion souls and expands toward the stars.

The trouble is, our biological evolution has given our separate genders different doses of empathy.

There is, of course, a lot of overlap. But women have the stronger dose for biological evolutionary reasons. From their moments of birth, human babies are helpless, irrational, bawling, peeing, pooing, vomiting bundles of trouble, which only their mothers can love. It takes a lot of empathy to carry them for nine months, give birth to them in pain, and then to raise such creatures. The biological role of mothers gives women a unique evolutionary trait—strong empathy—that differs from men’s far more starkly than any differences among racial, ethnic or national groups. With respect to empathy, women and men are practically distinct subspecies.

Unlike empathy, rage is a man’s tool. In the old days, not so long ago, when kings ruled by force and war, it played the same role as it did on the savannah—fueling war and domination of rival tribes and the expansion of territory and power.

As we humans tried to replace our raw biological-evolutionary emotions with civilization based on Reason, rage became less a tool of politics and more an unfortunate feature of male domination in family life. In the United States, one artistic expression of this push toward civilization is the famous painting of our Founders, dressed in the most elegant finery of their time, debating what became our Constitution.

But today our species appears to be reverting globally to its biological evolution in small clans. It seems to yearn for tyrants to make decisions simply and quickly, often fueled by rage against things like immigration and crime. When that happens, war and/or violent mass death can follow, as under the rule of Philippine president Duterte. Paradoxically, this trend seems most open and patent in the nation supposed to be the epitome of democracy and Reason, our own.

Two recent examples spring to mind. The first is the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as an Associate Justice of our Supreme Court. From a social-evolutionary perspective, that confirmation was one of the most extraordinary political events I have witnessed in my 74 years.

A female professor named Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of gross sexual assault as a drunken teenager. Everyone who viewed her testimony found it credible, and most acknowledged her personal courage and the emotional hardship she suffered in coming forward. There was voluminous evidence of Kavanaugh’s frequent drunkenness at that age, and of his meanness while drunk.

But with the sole alleged co-conspirator claiming not to remember, and with the whole incident by nature being private, there was no direct and specific corroboration of the particular alleged assault. There was only Ford’s credible word against Kavanaugh’s, plus voluminous anecdotal evidence of his drunkenness and poor character when young.

So what resolved the standoff? Was it careful investigation and sober consideration? No. It was rage.

Testifying on his own behalf for his confirmation, Kavanaugh flew into a rage, practically foaming at the mouth. You could almost see ghosts of all the kings and knights of history standing behind him, drawing their swords and threatening to slice up their opponents.

On the sole strength of that atavistic demonstration of male dominance, an all-male committee authorized a perfunctory “investigation.” Then a mostly male-and-GOP-dominated Senate confirmed Kavanaugh. It was a case of male rage securing a lifetime seat on the nation’s highest court, despite well-founded doubt about the nominee’s character and fitness.

Any resemblance between that Senate and the marvelous painting of our constitutional convention in serious, reasoned debate was purely coincidental. Pure male rage—a biological-evolutionary instrument of aggression and dominance—had won the day. It would be hard to imagine an outcome more at odds with the ethos of our Supreme Court—sober, deliberate and reasoned decisionmaking—or with the inscription on its building: “Equal justice under law.”

It was no coincidence that the midterm election that followed produced the largest “crop” of female members of Congress in history. Female voters rose up en masse to support their gender’s primary biological-evolutionary trait: empathy. They had empathy for all the women sexually assaulted without remedy throughout history, as well as all the calm and reasonable men blocked from power throughout history by blind rage.

Now we are witnessing a second, even more consequential, struggle between rage and empathy. Donald Trump stands accused of a host of evils, but most recently a single, simply told, patently impeachable offense.

His reaction would be worthy of any king from the age of monarchy, or of a modern tyrant like Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin. It was and is mostly blind rage. Trump foments against his accusers with abandon, calling them spies and traitors, impliedly threatening to execute them, as if fierce opposition to a rogue president would have been betrayal in our age of democracy. Like King Louis XIV of France, the pre-revolutionary monarch, Trump practically shouts “L’etat c’est moi!” (“I am the state!”). He seems increasingly unhinged.

But make no mistake about it. While hardly a man of intelligence, let alone a “very stable genius,” Trump is a master of our most atavistic social emotions. He dwells in the deep sinks of our biological evolution. Like a gigantic sump pump of evil, he can draw muck from those sinks and spew it on our population without warning. Thus he can undermine our modern civilization, so painstakingly refined over more than seven decades of postwar peace among major powers.

So Trump’s persistence in office and even the survival of American democracy hang in the balance. Can Trump “pull a Kavanaugh”? Can he, with a simple atavistic resort to male dominance and rage, attract enough of the Senate’s mostly male members to his side to escape conviction and removal?

The answer, as Nobel laureate Bob Dylan sung, is blowing in the wind. It all depends on how the perennial conflict between rage and empathy plays out, here and now, in the twenty-first-century United States.

Will mostly-male rage exert its atavistic power? Or will key senators feel a mostly-female empathy for all the people, in and out of government, whom Trump has insulted, belittled, nicknamed, bullied, defrauded, lied to and scammed, including many from the Senate itself?

There are, of course, many more legitimate objects of empathy than verbally abused and diminished Republicans. There are all the children torn from their mothers and fathers at the border and now confined, without human succor, under prison-like conditions. There are the refugees seeking asylum from horrendous perils in their countries of origin and held in near-concentration-camp conditions unworthy of a great nation. There are the lawfully working immigrants from south of the border, and their children, who are ripped from the only homes they have known for years. There are their friends and family left behind without them, and their communities.

Then there are all the non-white, non-Christian or sexually unconventional American citizens, who live in fear of unreasoning hatred and assault fostered and incited by our president. There are our allies abroad, who must now fend off genuinely fearsome adversaries without the strong and constant aid of a great power that once had stable and reliable foreign policies.

As we await the decisive battle between the hardness of rage and the softness of empathy, we can only marvel at the memory of that wonderful song from Gigi. “Thank Heaven for little girls,” indeed!

Thank Heaven, not only because little girls grow up to give us males love and children. More vital still, their biological-evolutionary empathy helps create and sustain our human civilization. It could yet save American democracy.

Permalink to this post