Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty PDF

Preface I have been studying empathy for thirty years, and my aim now is to put this remarkable substance on to the table so we can all look at it from every angle. In my first book, Mindblindness, I focused on one part of the nature of empathy (the part related to how we understand other people, th...

Preface I have been studying empathy for thirty years, and my aim now is to put this remarkable substance on to the table so we can all look at it from every angle. In my first book, Mindblindness, I focused on one part of the nature of empathy (the part related to how we understand other people, that is, the ‘cognitive’ part of empathy) and on the case of autism, where empathy difficulties abound. In my second book, The Essential Difference, I included the second part of empathy (the part related to our emotional reactions to people, that is, the ‘affective’ part of empathy), and on how the two sexes differ in empathy. In that book I again explored the flip side of empathy, with an analysis of the difficulties people with autism face in acquiring this essential skill. Now, in Zero Degrees of Empathy, I examine why some people become capable of cruelty, and whether a loss of empathy inevitably has this consequence. This book goes deeper into the subject than I have gone before, by drilling down into the brain basis of empathy and looking at its social and biological determinants, and it is broader too, by having a close look at some of the medical conditions that lead to a loss of empathy. My main goal is to understand human cruelty, replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term ‘empathy’. Those readers who wish to pursue the subject in more depth will find the relevant scientific papers (indicated by Arabic numbers) listed in the References starting on page 151. Points that are explained further in the Notes section are indicated by Roman numerals and can be found on pages 143–50. 1 Explaining ‘Evil’ and Human Cruelty When I was seven years old, my father told me the Nazis had turned Jews into lampshades. Just one of those comments that you hear once and the thought never goes away. To a child’s mind – even to an adult’s – these two types of thing just don’t belong together. He also told me the Nazis turned Jews into bars of soap. It sounds so unbelievable, yet it is actually true. I knew our family was Jewish, so this image of turning people into objects felt a bit close to home. My father also told me about one of his former girlfriends, Ruth i Goldblatt, whose mother had survived a concentration camp. He had been introduced to the mother and was shocked to discover that her hands were reversed. Nazi scientists had severed Mrs Goldblatt’s hands, switched them around and sewn them on again so that, if she put her hands out palms down, her thumbs were on the outside and her little fingers were on the inside. Just one of the many ‘experiments’ they had conducted. I realized there was a paradox at the heart of human nature – that people could objectify others – which my young mind was not yet ready to figure out. Years later, I was teaching at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London. I sat in on a lecture on physiology. The professor was teaching about human adaptation to temperature. He told the students the best data available on human adaptation to extreme cold had been collected by Nazi scientists performing ‘immersion experiments’ on Jews and other inmates of Dachau Concentration Camp, who they put into vats of freezing water. They collected systematic data on how heart rate correlated with time, at zero degrees centigrade. 4 Hearing about this unethical research ii retriggered that same question in my mind: how can humans treat other people as objects? How do humans come to switch off their natural feelings of sympathy for a fellow-human being who is suffering? Figure 1: Inmates in Dachau Concentration Camp subjected to a ‘cold water immersion experiment’. The experiment aimed to see if they could stay in freezing water for up to three hours. (On the left is Professor Ernst Holzlohner, and on the right is Dr Sigmund Rasher.) These examples are particularly shocking because they involve educated doctors and scientists (professions we are brought up to trust) performing inhumane experiments or operations. We have to assume these doctors were not being cruel for the sake of it. I (generously) assume the scientists doing the immersion experiments wanted to contribute to medical knowledge, to know, for example, how to help victims rescued after being shipwrecked in icy seas. Even the Nazi doctors who had sewn poor Mrs Goldblatt’s hands back to front were not (I assume) motivated to do cruel things for cruelty’s sake: they too were presumably following their scientific impulse, wanting to understand how to test the limits of micro-surgical procedures. What these scientists lost sight of, in their quest for knowledge, was the humanity of their ‘subjects’. It is an irony that the human sciences describe their objects of study as ‘subjects’, since this implies sensitivity to the feelings of the person being studied. In practice, the feelings of the subjects in these experiments were of no concern. Nazi laws defined Jews as genetically sub-human and ordered their extermination, as part of the eugenics programme of the time. Within this political framework, ‘using’ the inmates of concentration camps as ‘subjects’ in medical research might even have seemed to these doctors to be ethical, if it contributed knowledge for the greater good. Cruelty for its own sake was a part of ordinary Nazi guards’ behaviour. Sadly, there is no shortage of horrific examples, but I have selected just one from the biography of Thomas Buergenthal. 5 At just nine years old, Thomas was rounded up with thousands of Jews and taken to Auschwitz. There he had to watch while an inmate was forced to hang his friend who had tried to escape. The SS guard ordered the inmate to put a noose around his friend’s neck. The man couldn’t fulfil the order because his hands were shaking so much, with fear and distress. His friend turned to him, took the noose and, in a remarkable act, kissed his friend’s hand, and then put the noose around his own neck. Angrily, the SS guard kicked the chair away from under the man to be hanged. Nine-year-old Thomas and the other inmates, watching the man kissing his friend’s hand, rejoiced at that simple act that said (without words), ‘I will not let my friend be forced to kill me.’ Thomas survived Auschwitz (perhaps because his father taught him to stand close to the shed when Dr Mengele was making his selection of those who would die 6 this story in his book A Lucky Child. iii ) and described The empathy within the friendship comes through so powerfully in this awful situation, as does the extreme lack of empathy of the guard. If the aim was to punish or to set an example, the guard could have just shot the escapee himself. Presumably he chose this particular form of punishment because he wanted the two friends to suffer. Today, almost half a century after my father’s revelations to me about the extremes of human behaviour, my mind is still exercised by the same, single objective: to understand human cruelty. What greater reason for writing a book than the persistence of a single question that can gnaw away in one’s mind all of one’s conscious life? What other question could take root in such an unshakeable way? I presume the reason why I find myself returning to this question again and again is because the question of how human beings can ignore the humanity of others begs an answer – yet answers are not forthcoming. Or at least, those answers that are supplied are in some way unsatisfying. If the answers were sufficient, the question would feel as if it had been answered and the matter settled. There would be no need to restlessly and repeatedly return to it. Clearly, better answers are still needed. The standard explanation is that the Holocaust (sadly echoed, as we shall see, in many cultures historically across the globe) is an example of the ‘evil’ that humans are capable of inflicting on one another. Evil is treated as incomprehensible, a topic that cannot be dealt with because the scale of the horror is so great that nothing can convey its enormity. The standard view turns out to be widely held, and indeed the concept of evil is used as an explanation for such awful behaviour: Why did the murderer kill an innocent child? Because he was evil. Why did this terrorist become a suicide-bomber? Because she was evil. But, when you hold up the concept of evil to examine it, it is no explanation at all. For a scientist this is, of course, wholly inadequate. What the Nazis (and others like them) did was unimaginably terrible. But that doesn’t mean we should simply shut down enquiry into how people are capable of behaving in such ways, or use a non-explanation, saying such people are simply evil. As a scientist I want to understand the factors causing people to treat others as if they are mere objects. In this book I explore how people can treat each other cruelly, not with reference to the concept of evil, but with reference to the concept of empathy. Unlike the concept of evil, empathy has explanatory power. In the coming chapters I put empathy under the microscope. TURNING PEOPLE INTO OBJECTS The challenge is to explain how people are capable of causing extreme hurt to one another without resorting to the all-too-easy concept of evil. So let’s substitute the term ‘evil’ with the term ‘empathy erosion’. Empathy erosion can arise because of corrosive emotions, such as bitter resentment, or desire for revenge, or blind hatred, or desire to protect. In theory these are transient emotions, the empathy erosion reversible. But empathy erosion can be the result of more permanent psychological characteristics. The insight that underlying empathy erosion is people turning people into objects goes back at least to Martin Buber, an Austrian philosopher who resigned his professorship at the University of Frankfurt in 1933, when Hitler came to power. The title of his famous book is Ich und Du (I and Thou). 7 He contrasted the Ich-Du (I-You) mode of being (where you are connecting with another person, as an end in itself) with the Ich-Es (I-It) mode of being (where you are connecting with a person or object, so as to use them or it for some purpose). He argued that the latter mode of treating a person was devaluing. Figure 2: Martin Buber When our empathy is switched off, we are solely in the ‘I’ mode. In such a state we relate only to things, or to people as if they were just things. Most of us are capable of doing this occasionally. We might be quite capable of focusing on our work without sparing a thought for the homeless person on the street outside our office. But, whether we are in this state transiently or permanently, there is no ‘thou’ visible – at least, not a ‘thou’ with different thoughts and feelings. Treating other people as if they were just objects is one of the worst things you can do to another human being, to ignore their subjectivity, their thoughts and feelings. When a person is solely focused on the pursuit of their own interests they have all the potential to be unempathic. At best, in this state, they are in a world of their own and their behaviour will have little negative impact on others. They might end up in this state of mind because of years of resentment and hurt (often the result of conflict), or, as we shall see, for more enduring, neurological reasons. (Interestingly, in this state of singleminded pursuit of one’s own goals, one’s project might even have a positive focus: helping people, for example. But even if a person’s project is positive, iv worthy and valuable, if it is single-minded, it is by definition unempathic. ) So, now we’ve made a specific move: aiming to explain how people can be cruel to each other not out of evil but because of empathy erosion. While that feels marginally more satisfying as an answer (it is at least the beginning of an explanation), it is still far from a complete answer. That’s because it begs the further questions of what empathy is, and how it can be eroded. But at least these are tractable questions, and ones we shall attempt to answer as we proceed through this book. By the end of our journey, there should be less of a nagging need for answers to the big question of understanding human cruelty. The mind should be quieted if the answers are beginning to feel satisfying. But before we delve into the nature of empathy let’s look at a handful of factual examples from around the world, to prove that the awful things the Nazis did were not unique to the Nazis. We have to go through this if only to eliminate one (in my opinion) absurd view, which is that the Nazis were in some way uniquely cruel. As you’ll see, they weren’t. EMPATHY EROSION AROUND THE GLOBE Erosion of empathy is a state of mind that can be found in any culture. In 2006 I was in Kenya with my family on holiday. We landed in Nairobi, a massive international city, swirling with people. Nairobi is sadly home to one of the largest slums in Africa. People sleeping on the streets, mothers dying of AIDS, malnourished children begging or doing anything they can to survive. I met Esther, a young Kenyan woman, one of the fortunate ones who had a job. She warned me to be careful of the rising crime in Nairobi. ‘I was in the supermarket,’ she said. ‘Suddenly, a woman near me who was queuing to pay for her groceries let out a scream. A man behind her had cut off her finger. In the commotion, the man slid the wedding ring off the severed finger, and ran off into the crowds. It all happened so quickly.’ This is a shocking example of what one person can do to another. Formulating the plan to go out into the crowded supermarket to steal is easy enough to comprehend, especially if you are starving. Formulating the plan to take a knife with you is a bit harder to identify with, since it indicates clear premeditation to cut something. But for me the key moment is to imagine the mind of the person in the seconds just before committing the act of cutting. At that very moment, presumably all that is visible to the thief is the target (the ring), a small object that could feed him for weeks. All that is lying between him and his next meal is the woman’s finger that has to be severed. The fact that the finger is attached to a hand is mere inconvenience, and cold logic points to the solution: detach it. The fact that the hand is attached to a person, with her own life and her own feelings, is at that moment irrelevant. Out of mind. It is an example of turning another person into (no more than) an object. My argument is that when you treat someone as an object, your empathy has been turned off. The above example might suggest that someone capable of this crime had a momentary blip. Could the perpetrator’s desperation, hunger and poverty have been so overwhelming that he temporarily lost his empathy for the victim? We have all experienced, or observed in others, such transient states, where afterwards one’s empathy recovers. I’m guessing that during your transient lapses in empathy nothing as awful happens as we saw in this example. This suggests that what this man did to this woman was more than a transient lapse. My concern in this book is with this more enduring phenomenon – the result of more stable traits where it is harder, if not impossible, to recover one’s empathy, and where the consequences can be extremely serious. We will have a close look at people in the population who desperately need empathy, but who for various reasons don’t have it – and probably never will. More of that later. For now, I am going to limit myself to four other examples of empathy erosion around the planet, because you don’t need lots of distressing examples to have proof that this can happen in any culture. This next example concerns Josef Fritzl, who built a cellar in his home in Amstetten in northern Austria. You probably heard about this case, since it made worldwide headline news. 8 On 24 August 1984 he imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth down in the cellar and kept her there for twenty-four years, telling his wife she had gone missing. He raped Elisabeth – day after day – from the age of eleven and well into her young adulthood. She ended up having seven children in the basement prison, one of whom died aged three days old, and whose body her father (the child’s father and grandfather) burned to dispose of the evidence. Repeatedly during those twenty-four years, Josef and his wife Rosemarie appeared on Austrian television, apparently distressed by Elisabeth’s disappearance, appealing to the public to help them trace her. Josef, now aged seventy-three, claimed that three of the children mysteriously turned up on his doorstep, abandoned by their mother, and he and his wife (their grandmother) raised them. The other three children grew up in the basement prison, ending up with major psychological disturbance. How could a father treat his daughter as an object and deprive her and three of his children/grandchildren of their right to freedom in this way? Where was his empathy? The next example of empathy erosion which stopped me in my tracks was a report on the BBC 9 from Uganda. Rebel soldiers came into the village of Pajong. It was 24 July 2002. Esther Rechan was a young mother who described what happened: My two-year-old was sitting on the veranda. The rebels started kicking him. They kicked him to death … I had my five-year-old with me, when the female rebel commander ordered all of us with children to pick them up and smash them against the veranda poles. We had to hit them until they were dead. All of us with children, we had to kill them. If you did it slowly they would beat you and force you to hit your children harder, against the poles. In all, seven children were killed by their mothers like that. My own child was only five. v What was going through the minds of these rebel soldiers, that they could force a mother to batter her own child to death? Now consider an example from a lesser-known holocaust, one not committed by the Nazis. I heard about this when I went to Turkey last summer. The Turks are renowned for their warm, welcoming, friendly culture, but, when Turkey was under Ottoman rule, they regarded Christian ethnic Armenians as second-class citizens. As far back as the 1830s, for example, Armenians were not eligible to give testimony against Muslims in court – their evidence was considered ‘inadmissible’. By the 1870s the Armenians were pressing for reforms, and during the 1890s at least 100,000 of them were killed. On 24 April 1915, 250 Armenian intellectuals were rounded up, imprisoned and killed. 10 On 13 September, the Ottoman parliament passed a law decreeing the ‘expropriation and confiscation’ of Armenian property, and Armenians began to be marched from Turkey to the Syrian town of Deir ez Zor. En route and subsequently in twenty-five concentration camps near Turkey’s modern borders with Iraq and Syria, 1.5 million were killed. Some were killed in mass burnings, others by injection by morphine, yet others by toxic gas. It is a history that is not often told, and the genocide of the Armenians is clear proof (if any were needed) that the Holocaust was not unique to the Nazis. Here’s my last example of extreme human cruelty, this time from the Democratic Republic of Congo. vi Mirindi Euprazi was at home in her village of Ninja in the Walungu region in 1994 when the rebels attacked. She told her story: ‘They forced my son to have sex with me, and when he’d finished they killed him. Then they raped me in front of my husband and then they killed him too. Then they took away my three daughters.’ She hasn’t heard of the three girls since. She describes being left naked while her house was burned. I imagine – like me – you are astonished beyond words by this event. How do rebel soldiers lose sight of the fact that the person they raped is a woman, no different to their own mothers? How can they treat her as an object in this way? How do they ignore that this boy – forced to have sex with his mother – is just a teenager, with normal feelings? But that’s more than enough as examples of human cruelty from different cultures to remind us of what humans are capable. If I’m right that such acts are the result of no empathy, then what we need urgently are answers to the more basic questions of what is empathy, and why do some people have less than others? 2 The Empathy Mechanism: The Bell Curve Unempathic acts are simply the tail end of a bell curve, found in every population on the planet. If we want to replace the term ‘evil’ with the term ‘empathy’, we have to understand empathy closely. The key idea is that we all lie somewhere on an empathy spectrum (from high to low). People said to be ‘evil’ or cruel are simply at one extreme of the empathy spectrum. We can all be lined up along this spectrum of individual differences, based on how much empathy we have. In this chapter we begin the search to understand why some people have more or less empathy. We need to understand the empathy bell curve both to get underneath the surface of this mysterious, powerful substance, empathy, and because at one end of this spectrum we find ‘zero degrees of empathy’. But first we need a definition of empathy. There are lots of ways to define it but here’s how mine begins: Empathy occurs when we suspend our single-minded focus of attention, and instead adopt a double-minded focus of attention. ‘Single-minded’ attention means we are thinking only about our own mind, our current thoughts or perceptions. ‘Double-minded’ attention means we are keeping in mind someone else’s mind, at the very same time. This immediately gives a clue to what empathy entails. When empathy is switched off, we think only about our own interests. When empathy is switched on, we focus on other people’s interests too. Sometimes attention is compared to a spotlight, so this new definition of empathy suggests our attention can either be a single spotlight (shining through the darkness on our own interests) or it can be accompanied by a second spotlight (shining on someone else’s interests). But the definition of empathy doesn’t stop there. This first part of the definition merely delineates the form that empathy takes (the dual focus). It also hints at the kind of mechanism in the brain that empathy requires: a separation of how we reflect on two minds at once (self, and other). vii We’re going to look at empathy in the brain later in this chapter. But so far my definition ignores the process and the content of what happens during empathy. So we can extend the definition of empathy as follows: Empathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling, and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion. This suggests there are at least two stages in empathy: recognition and response. Both are needed, since if you have the former without the latter you haven’t empathized at all. If I can see in your face that you are struggling to lift your suitcase onto the overhead rack on the train and I just sit there and watch, then I have failed to respond to your feelings (of frustration). Empathy therefore requires not only that you can identify another person’s feelings and thoughts, but that you respond to these with an appropriate emotion too. viii Later in the book I’ll be introducing you to people with particular medical conditions where one or both of these components of empathy are missing, or fail to develop normally. When that second spotlight is working, and you are able to both recognize and respond, you can not only ask someone how they are feeling, you can sensitively avoid hurting their feelings, think about how to make them feel good, and consider how everything you say or do impacts on them or others. When they tell you how they are, you can follow up not just on what they say, but also on how they say it – reading their face as if it transparently reflects their inner thoughts and feelings. If they are suffering to any degree, you just know to offer comfort and sympathy. But if your attention has a single focus – your current interest, goal, wish, or plan – with no reference to another person or their thoughts and feelings, then your empathy is effectively switched off. It might be switched off because your attention is elsewhere, a transient fluctuation in your state. For example, if you are rummaging frenetically through your belongings, your attention might be focused solely on your own current goal of urgently finding something. Some thing. At that moment, you may have lost sight of another person, or at least lost sight of their feelings. In such a state of single-mindedness, the other person – or their feelings – no longer exists. All that matters is solving your immediate problem: finding the object, fixing something, whatever it is you are trying to achieve. If someone interrupted you to ask what you were doing, your narrative would be onesided: a report of your own current preoccupation. The language you would use to describe this state would be totally self-focused. In this book we encounter people who are imprisoned in their own selffocus. Imprisoned, because for them it is not a temporary state of mind after which their empathy can recover. For them, self-focus is all that is available to them, as if a chip in their neural computer is missing. A temporary fluctuation in one’s empathy is potentially rescuable. An enduring lack of empathy, as a stable trait, potentially is not. Being able to empathize means being able to understand accurately the other person’s position, to identify with ‘where they are at’. It means being able to find solutions to what might otherwise be a deadlock between incompatible goals. Empathy makes the other person feel valued, enabling them to feel their thoughts and feelings have been heard, acknowledged and respected. Empathy allows you to make a close friend and to look after the friendship. Empathy avoids any risk of misunderstandings or miscommunication, by figuring out what the other person might have intended. It allows you to avoid causing offence by anticipating how things will be experienced by another mind, different to your own. Just because you thought your actions or words were harmless fun doesn’t mean the other person will receive them in the same way. Although this book mostly