Reviewed here: The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, by Frans de Waal; The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals, by Charles Siebert
The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want.” So writes eminent primatologist Frans de Waal about a third of the way into his latest, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. As nature readers go, de Waal is among the most accomplished. He has spent the better part of 30 years studying chimpanzees and bonobos, sometimes in the wild, but mostly in his capacity as director of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Ga.
And what a sobering education the apes have given him. For six books, de Waal has chronicled their scheming and their turf battles, their amazing problem-solving abilities and sexual politics. From the start, it has been clear to de Waal that the apes represent a kind of proto-human society, with many of our same patterns and preoccupations. These days, there is nothing controversial about this view; it's trotted out by pundits and newspaper columnists at every opportunity, all of them enthralled by evolutionary psychology – the idea that all of human nature can be explained by adaptive responses formed on the prehistoric savannah – as a kind of arch-explanatory paradigm. If we want to understand ourselves, the thinking goes, then look to our ape ancestors, who exhibit many of the same traits in more elemental form.
The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, by Frans de Waal, McClelland & Stewart, 291 pages, $32.99
De Waal is very much with this program, and he is an astute enough cultural commentator to recognize how the specific details of this narrative influence politics and society. If you believe that humans are fundamentally competitive and selfish – “nature red in tooth and claw,” the body a teaming aggregate of “selfish genes” scrambling over each other to maximize individual profit – then perhaps you let the free markets rule the day. “Can't fight nature,” shrugs the conservative.
But if you believe humans are by nature altruistic and conciliatory, then perhaps you organize society in a more socially responsible mode, with an emphasis on collective interests.
This, finally, is the news – the very good news – from de Waal's book: Yes, like our ape ancestors, humans are “incentive-driven animals, focused on status, territory and food security.” But we are also group animals, sensitive to injustice, highly co-operative and sympathetic. We are, in short, both Canadian and American. And so are the apes. And off we go, into the new age of empathy, in what is for the most part an enjoyable tour through a kinder and gentler animal kingdom.
De Waal is an excellent tour guide, refreshingly literate outside his field, deft at stitching bits of philosophy and anthropology into the narrative. He is also pleasingly opinionated; he seems to have columnist aspirations of his own, and his frequent – usually thoughtful and balanced, occasionally facile – digressions on morality and U.S. politics read like boilerplate New York Times editorials.
Empathy, de Waal says, is one of our most innate capacities, one that likely evolved from mammalian parental care. It begins in the body, a deep unconscious synchrony between mother and child that sets the tone for so many mammalian interactions. When someone smiles, we smile; when they yawn, we yawn; emotion is contagious.
The effects of this can be profound; at one point, de Waal describes some research on long-term married couples, who, studies have apparently shown, do come to resemble each other over time. It is as if they “internalize” one another, de Waal writes, the constant synchronization of facial expression and mood slowly morphing two into one.
And chimps, too, feel this contagion – apes ape. They mirror and they console, they grieve and they co-operate, they hold to principles of fairness beyond personal gain. And more besides. De Waal is thorough in his documentation, sometimes too thorough: The second half of the book reads at times like a social scientist's checklist of category-fulfilling anecdotes.
He makes up for it in his final chapter, which presents a rich and multilayered model of empathy. Like a Russian doll, simple body-to-body “state matching” is contained within a larger concern for others, and this in turn is contained within the imaginative ability to take on another's perspective. As humans, this may be our greatest gift, though, as de Waal demonstrates, perhaps not ours alone.
