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The Age Of Empathy: Nature's Lessons For A Kinder Society (2009)

by Frans de Waal(Favorite Author)

3.96 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0307407764 (ISBN13: 9780307407764)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Crown

review 1: Indeed it is extraordinary how the horses and sled-dogs cooperate with each other and act in unison drawing the carriage or the sled at breakneck speeds, on cross-country pathways! Especially the blind-husky, Isobel who ran the lead tandem?! In Dutch bicycle-culture, it is very common for boys to offer girls a ride, because the girls have to hold on tight, and also lean with the rider says, Dr. Frans de Waal, who is a Dutchman himself, who continues, "On motorcycles this is even more critical. Their higher speed requires, deeper tilt in turns and lack of coordination can be disastrous. The passenger is a true partner in ride....". Very True! Guess for the same reason, I find partner-dancing (eg. Tango) so interesting (pardon my little digression). Another fascinating true ... morestory the author relates is apparently published in the Journal of New England Medicine. This was about Oscar the tom cat who made his rounds in a geriatric clinic in Providence, RI. The cat sniffed and observed each patient, strolling from room to room. When he decided someone is about to die, he curled up besides them, purring and gently nuzzling them. He left the room only after the patient has taken his/her last breath! Here are some of the salient things in author's own words, that I've book-marked, and hope to recount for a very long time."The appeal that elephants hold for humans is nothing less than astonishing and already witnessed in ancient Rome, not a place for squeamishness. Pliny the elder describes the way the crowd reacted to 20 elephants being savaged in an arena. When they had lost all hope of escape, they tried gain compassion of crowd, by indescribable gestures of entreaty, deploring their fate with sort of wailing, so much to the distress of public... that the public rose in body, bursting into tears and in unison started cursing the generals and heads of Pompeii. We humans are complex characters who form social hierarchies naturally, but at the same time we have an aversion to them and readily sympathize with others, unless we are threatened. We tolerate differences in income and standards of living, only up to a degree. We have deeply ingrained sense of fairness.The faith Danes(ref. people from Denmark), put in one another is called social capital, which may well be the most precious capital there is. In survey after survey, Danes have the world's highest happiness score. I saw people in America living in the kind of poverty that I knew only from the 3rd world! How could the richest nation in the world permit this? It became worse for me when I discovered that poor kids go to poor schools. How can a society claim equal opportunity, if location of one's birth determines quality of one's education and eventually quality of one's life. The obscene earnings of top 1% is back to the great depression levels and we have become, a winner takes all society, with an income gap that seriously threatens the social fabric. Europe is a more livable place and it lacks the giant under-educated, under-class of the United States. Marxism is founded on an illusion of culturally engineered human. Similar illusion plagued the US feminist movement, assuming gender roles are ready for a complete overhaul! The greatest problem today, of different groups rubbing shoulders on a crowded planet, is excessive loyalty to one's own nation, one's own ethnic-group, and one's own religion. Humans are capable of deep disdain for anyone who looks different or thinks in another way. When push comes to shove, groups do not hesitate to eliminate another! When asked about Iraqi civilian casualties, Donald Rumsfeld once said, well we do not do body counts on 'other people'. Fostering empathy is not made easy by the entrenched opinion, in Law schools, Business schools and Political corridors, that we are essentially competitive animals. Conservatives who champion social Darwinism, miss the point by a mile, that we are deeply and innately social animals! Empathy is a part of our evolution. Humans must be biologically equipped to function effectively in many social situations without undue reliance on cognitive processes. Ultimately the reluctance to talk about animal emotions has less to do with science than with religion, and particularly the religions that arose in isolation from animals! With monkeys and apes around every corner, no rain-forest culture has ever produced a religion, that puts humans outside of nature! Similarly in the east, surrounded by native primates in India and China, religions don't draw a sharp line between humans and other animals. Men may reincarnate as animals, and animals may attain divinity, like the monkey god Hanumaan. Only the Judeo-Christian religions place humans on a pedestal making them the only species with a soul. It is not hard to see how the desert nomads might have arrived at this view. Without animals holding up a mirror to them, the notion we are alone came naturally to them. They saw themselves as created in God's image and only intelligent life on the planet. It is extremely telling how westerners reacted when they finally got to see animals capable of challenging these notions! All of this occurred after western religion spread it's human exceptional-ism to all corners of the world. Empathy engages brain areas that are more than a hundred million years old. Evolution added layer after layer, until our ancestors felt what others felt and also understood what others might want or need. It is put like a Russian doll. Called the 5th horseman of apocalypse, dehumanization has a long history of excusing atrocities.Although men are violent and territorial, men clearly do have empathy. Cross cultural studies claim female brains are more hardwired for empathy but men can be just as empathetic as women. Why does the 'dismal science' attract so few female students and never produced a female Nobelist?! Could it be that women don't feel any connection to the caricature of a rational being, whose only goal in life, is to maximize profit? Where are human relations in all of this. Every individual is connected to something larger than itself. Those who depict this as contrived and not part of biology, don't have the latest neurological data on their side! The connection is deeply felt! The role of compassion in society is not one of sacrificing time and money to relive the plight of others but also to push political agenda to elevate human dignity! One instrument that greatly enriches our thinking has been selected by ages, which means tested over and over with regard to it's survival value. That is our capacity to connect to and understand others and make their situation our own, the way Lincoln did when he came eye to eye with shackled-slaves in Ohio. To call upon this inborn capacity is only to any society's advantage"Hence 4-stars!
review 2: The Age of Empathy delves into social, economic, and political concerns of our time. By unlocking the the science of empathy in all mammals, Frans de Waal challenges the notion that greed and aggression are the dominate forces of human biology and survival. He gives of a new story of mammalian evolution, in which cooperation and empathy play a prominent role. Empathy becomes a much older and primal instinct, and much more relevant to our species. Waal knocks down those who use the idea of "survival of the fittest" to excuse their behavior. From CEO's to politicians, religious leaders to economists Waal shows how social Darwinism has been used to defend greed and freeloading. He also points to how these policies have failed our society as we experienced in the hosing and banking crises, the fall of CEO's like Kenneth Lay, and trickle down economics. All the while connecting these human experiences to the experience of empathy in primate societies. It is fascinating to read about the advances in science that are changing our understanding of animal cognition and emotion. It turns out that animals are much more like 'us' than we thought. So much of what we thought we knew was wrong and limited by poor experimental design. The distinction between human and ape is becoming more gray than black and white. There is so much to think about and talk about after reading this book. It makes connections to so many different areas. I highly recommend it! less

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