[tt] [technoliberation] Neuroscience and Moral Politics: Mirror Neurons and Cultural Hegemony

[Eugen Leitl]

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http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/10/neuroscience-and-moral-politics-ch
omskys-intellectual-progeny/

Neuroscience and Moral Politics: Chomsky's Intellectual Progeny

Are humans "wired for empathy"? How does this affect what Chomsky calls
the "manufacturing of consent"?

by Gary Olson / October 24th, 2007

    Throughout the world, teachers, sociologists, policymakers and
parents are discovering that empathy may be the single most important
quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.
    -Arundhati Roy

    The official directives needn't be explicit to be well understood:
Do not let too much empathy move in unauthorized directions.
    -Norman Solomon

The nonprofit Edge Foundation recently asked some of the world's most
eminent scientists, "What are you optimistic about? Why?" In response,
the prominent neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni cites the proliferating
experimental work into the neural mechanisms that reveal how humans are
"wired for empathy."

Iacoboni's optimism is grounded in his belief that, with the
popularization of scientific insights, these recent findings in
neuroscience will seep into public awareness and "... this explicit
level of understanding our empathic nature will at some point dissolve
the massive belief systems that dominate our societies and that threaten
to destroy us." (Iacoboni, 2007, p. 14)

While there are reasons to remain skeptical (see below) about the
progressive political implications flowing from this work, a body of
impressive empirical evidence reveals that the roots of prosocial
behavior, including moral sentiments such as empathy, precede the
evolution of culture. This work sustains Noam Chomsky's visionary
writing about a human moral instinct, and his assertion that, while the
principles of our moral nature have been poorly understood, "we can
hardly doubt their existence or their central role in our intellectual
and moral lives." (Chomsky, 1971, n.p., 1988; 2005, p. 263)

In his influential book Mutual Aid (1972, p. 57; 1902), the Russian
revolutionary anarchist, geographer, and naturalist Petr Kropotkin,
maintained that "... under any circumstances sociability is the greatest
advantage in the struggle for life. Those species which willingly
abandon it are doomed to decay." Species cooperation provided an
evolutionary advantage, a "natural" strategy for survival.

While Kropotkin readily acknowledged the role of competition, he
asserted that mutual aid was a "moral instinct" and "natural law." Based
on his extensive studies of the animal world, he believed that this
predisposition toward helping one another-human sociality-was of
"prehuman origin." Killen and Cords, in a fittingly titled piece "Prince
Kropotkin's Ghost," suggest that recent research in developmental
psychology and primatology seems to vindicate Kropotkin's century-old
assertions (2002).

The emerging field of the neuroscience of empathy parallels
investigations being undertaken in cognate fields. Some forty years ago
the celebrated primatologist Jane Goodall observed and wrote about
chimpanzee emotions, social relationships, and "chimp culture," but
experts remained skeptical. A decade ago, the famed primate scientist
Frans B.M. de Waal (1996) wrote about the antecedents to morality in
Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other
Animals, but scientific consensus remained elusive.

All that's changed. As a recent editorial in the journal Nature (2007)
put it, it's now "unassailable fact" that human minds, including aspects
of moral thought, are the product of evolution from earlier primates.
According to de Waal, "You don't hear any debate now." In his more
recent work, de Waal plausibly argues that human morality-including our
capacity to empathize-is a natural outgrowth or inheritance of behavior
from our closest evolutionary relatives.

Following Darwin, highly sophisticated studies by biologists Robert Boyd
and Peter Richerson posit that large-scale cooperation within the human
species-including with genetically unrelated individuals within a
group-was favored by selection. (Hauser, 2006, p. 416) Evolution
selected for the trait of empathy because there were survival benefits
in coming to grips with others. In his book, People of the Lake (1978)
the world-renowned paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey unequivocally
declares, "We are human because our ancestors learned to share their
food and their skills in an honored network of obligation."

Studies have shown that empathy is present in very young children, even
at eighteen months of age and possibly younger. In the primate world,
Warneken and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute at Leipzig, Germany,
recently found that chimps extend help to unrelated chimps and
unfamiliar humans, even when inconvenienced and regardless of any
expectation of reward. This suggests that empathy may lie behind this
natural tendency to help and that it was a factor in the social life of
the common ancestor to chimpanzees and humans at the split some six
million years ago (New Scientist, 2007; Warneken and Tomasello, 2006).
It's now indisputable that we share moral faculties with other species
(de Waal, 2006; Trivers, 1971; Katz, 2000; Gintis, 2005; Hauser, 2006;
Bekoff, 2007; Pierce, 2007). Pierce notes that there are "countless
anecdotal accounts of elephants showing empathy toward sick and dying
animals, both kin and non-kin" (2007, p. 6). And recent research in
Kenya has conclusively documented elephant's open grieving/empathy for
other dead elephants.

Mogil and his team at McGill University recently demonstrated that mice
feel distress when they observe other mice experiencing pain. They
tentatively concluded that the mice engaged visual cues to bring about
this empathic response (Mogil, 2006; Ganguli, 2006). De Waal's response
to this study: "This is a highly significant finding and should open the
eyes of people who think empathy is limited to our species." (Carey,
2006)

Further, Grufman and other scientists at the National Institutes of
Health have offered persuasive evidence that altruistic acts activate a
primitive part of the brain, producing a pleasurable response (2007).
And recent research by Koenigs and colleagues (2007) indicates that
within the brain's prefrontal cortex, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex
or VMPC is required for emotions and moral judgment. Damage to the VMPC
has been linked to psychopathic behavior. This led to the belief that as
a rule, psychopaths do not experience empathy or remorse.

A study by Miller (2001) and colleagues of the brain disorder
frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is also instructive. FTD attacks the
frontal lobes and anterior temporal lobes, the site of one's sense of
self. One early symptom of FTD is the loss of empathy.

We know from neuroscientific empathy experiments that the same affective
brain circuits are automatically mobilized upon feeling one's own pain
and the pain of others. Through brain imaging, we also know that
separate neural processing regions then free up the capacity to take
action. As Decety notes, empathy then allows us to "forge connections
with people whose lives seem utterly alien from us" (Decety, 2006, p.
2). Where comparable experience is lacking, this "cognitive empathy"
builds on the neural basis and allows one to "actively project oneself
into the shoes of another person" by trying to imagine the other
person's situation (Preston, in press), Preston and de Waal (2002).
Empathy is "other directed," the recognition of the other's humanity.

***

So where does this leave us? If morality is rooted in biology, in the
raw material or building blocks for the evolution of its expression, we
now have a pending fortuitous marriage of hard science and secular
morality in the most profound sense. The technical details of the social
neuroscientific analysis supporting these assertions lie outside this
paper, but suffice it to say that progress is proceeding at an
exponential pace and the new discoveries are persuasive (Decety and
Lamm, 2006; Lamm, 2007; Jackson, 2004 and 2006).

That said, one of the most vexing problems that remains to be explained
is why so little progress has been made in extending this empathic
orientation to distant lives, to those outside certain in-group moral
circles. Given a world rife with overt and structural violence, one is
forced to explain why our deep-seated moral intuition doesn't produce a
more ameliorating effect, a more peaceful world. Iacoboni suggests this
disjuncture is explained by massive belief systems, including political
and religious ones, operating on the reflective and deliberate level.
These tend to override the automatic, pre-reflective, neurobiological
traits that should bring people together.

Here a few cautionary notes are warranted. The first is that social
context and triggering conditions are critical because, where there is
conscious and massive elite manipulation, it becomes exceedingly
difficult to get in touch with our moral faculties. Ervin Staub, a
pioneering investigator in the field, acknowledges that even if empathy
is rooted in nature, people will not act on it "... unless they have
certain kinds of life experiences that shape their orientation toward
other human beings and toward themselves (Staub, 2002, p. 222). As
Jensen puts it, "The way we are educated and entertained keep us from
knowing about or understanding the pain of others" (2002). Circumstances
may preclude and overwhelm our perceptions, rendering us incapable of
recognizing and giving expression to moral sentiments (Albert, n.d.; and
also, Pinker, 2002). For example, the fear-mongering of artificially
created scarcity may attenuate the empathic response. The limitation
placed on exposure is another. As reported recently in the New York
Times, the Pentagon imposes tight embedding restrictions on journalist's
ability to run photographs and other images of casualties in Iraq.
Photographs of coffins returning to Dover Air Base in Delaware are
simply forbidden. Memorial services for the fallen are also now
prohibited even if the unit gives its approval.

The second cautionary note is Hauser's (2006) observation that proximity
was undoubtedly a factor in the expression of empathy. In our
evolutionary past an attachment to the larger human family was virtually
incomprehensible and, therefore, the emotional connection was lacking.
Joshua Greene, a philosopher and neuroscientist, adds that "We evolved
in a world where people in trouble right in front of you existed, so our
emotions were tuned to them, whereas we didn't face the other kind of
situation." He suggests that to extend this immediate emotion-linked
morality-one based on fundamental brain circuits-to unseen victims
requires paying less attention to intuition and more to the cognitive
dimension. If this boundary isn't contrived, it would seem, at a
minimum, circumstantial and thus worthy of reassessing morality (Greene,
2007, n.p.). Given some of the positive dimensions of globalization, the
potential for identifying with the "stranger" has never been more
robust.

Finally, as Preston (2006-2007; and also, in press) suggests, risk and
stress tend to suppress empathy whereas familiarity and similarity
encourage the experience of natural, reflexive empathy. This formidable
but not insurmountable challenge warrants further research into how this
"out-group" identity is created and reinforced.

It may be helpful, as Halpern (1993, p. 169) suggests, to think of
empathy as a sort of spark of natural curiosity, prompting a need for
further understanding and deeper questioning. However, our understanding
of how or whether political engagement follows remains in its infancy
and demands further investigation.

***

Almost a century ago, Stein (1917) wrote about empathy as "the
experience of foreign consciousness in general." Salles' film The
Motorcycle Diaries addresses empathy, albeit indirectly. The film
follows Ernesto Guevara de la Serna and his friend Alberto Granada on an
eight-month trek across Argentina, Peru, Columbia, Chile and Venezuela.

When leaving his leafy, upper middle-class suburb (his father is an
architect) in Buenos Aires in 1952, Guevara is 23 and a semester away
from earning his medical degree. The young men embark on an adventure, a
last fling before settling down to careers and lives of privilege. They
are preoccupied with women, fun and adventure and certainly not seeking
or expecting a life-transforming odyssey.

The film's power is in its depiction of Guevara's emerging political
awareness that occurs as a consequence of unfiltered cumulative
experiences. During their 8,000-mile journey, they encounter massive
poverty, exploitation, and brutal working conditions, all consequences
of an unjust international economic order. By the end, Guevara has
turned away from being a doctor because medicine is limited to treating
the symptoms of poverty. For him, revolution becomes the expression of
empathy, the only effective way to address suffering's root causes. This
requires melding the cognitive component of empathy with engagement,
with resistance against asymmetrical power, always an inherently
political act. Otherwise, empathy has no meaning. (This roughly
parallels the political practice of brahma-viharas by engaged
Buddhists.) In his own oft-quoted words (not included in the film),
Guevara stated that, "The true revolutionary is guided by a great
feeling of love."

Paul Farmer, the contemporary medical anthropologist, infectious-disease
specialist and international public health activist, has adopted
different tactics, but his diagnosis of the "pathologies of power" is
remarkably similar to Guevara. He also writes approvingly of Cuba's
health programs, comparing them with his long work experience in Haiti.
Both individuals were motivated early on by the belief that artificial
epidemics have their origin in unjust socioeconomic structures, hence
the need for social medicine, a "politics as medicine on a grand scale."
Both exemplify exceptional social outliers of engaged empathy and the
interplay of affective, cognitive and moral components. For Farmer's
radical critique of structural violence and the connections between
disease and social inequality, see (Farmer, 2003; Kidder, 2003). Again,
it remains to be explained why there is such a paucity of real world
examples of empathic behavior? Why is U.S. culture characterized by a
massive empathy deficit of almost pathological proportions? And what
might be reasonably expected from a wider public understanding of the
nature of empathy?

Hauser posits a "universal moral grammar," hard-wired into our neural
circuits via evolution. This neural machinery precedes conscious
decisions in life-and-death situations, however, we observe "nurture
entering the picture to set the parameters and guide us toward the
acquisition of particular moral systems." At other points, he suggests
that environmental factors can push individuals toward defective moral
reasoning, and the various outcomes for a given local culture are
seemingly limitless. (Hauser, 2006) For me, this discussion of cultural
variation fails to give sufficient attention to the socioeconomic
variables responsible for shaping the culture.

"It all has to do with the quality of justice and the availability of
opportunity." (2006, p. 151). Earlier, Goldschmidt (1999, n.p.) argued
that, "Culturally derived motives may replace, supplement or override
genetically programmed behavior."

Cultures are rarely neutral, innocent phenomena but are consciously set
up to reward some people and penalize others. As Parenti (2006)
forcefully asserts, certain aspects of culture can function as
instruments of social power and social domination through ideological
indoctrination. Culture is part and parcel of political struggle, and
studying culture can reveal how power is exercised and on whose behalf.

Cohen and Rogers, in parsing Chomsky's critique of elites, note that
"Once an unjust order exists, those benefiting from it have both an
interest in maintaining it and, by virtue of their social advantages,
the power to do so." (Cohen, 1991, p. 17) (For a concise but not
uncritical treatment of Chomsky's social and ethical views, see Cohen,
1991.) Clearly, the vaunted human capacity for verbal communication cuts
both ways. In the wrong hands, this capacity is often abused by
consciously quelling the empathic response. When de Waal writes,
"Animals are no moral philosophers," I'm left to wonder if he isn't
favoring the former in this comparison. (de Waal, 1996b, n.p.)

One of the methods employed within capitalist democracies is Chomsky's
and Herman's "manufacture of consent," a form of highly sophisticated
thought control. Potentially active citizens must be "distracted from
their real interests and deliberately confused about the way the world
works." (Cohen, 1991, p. 7; Chomsky, 1988)

For this essay, and following Chomsky, I'm arguing that the human mind
is the primary target of this perverse "nurture" or propaganda, in part
because exposure to certain new truths about empathy-hard evidence about
our innate moral nature-poses a direct threat to elite interests.
There's no ghost in the machine, but the capitalist machine attempts to
keep people in line with an ideological ghost, the notion of a self
constructed on market values. But ". . . if no one saw himself or
herself as capitalism needs them to do, their own self-respect would bar
the system from exploiting and manipulating them." (Kelleher, 2007) That
is, given the apparent universality of this biological predisposition
toward empathy, we have a potent scientific baseline upon which to
launch further critiques of elite manipulation, this cultivation of
callousness.

First, the evolutionary and biological origins of empathy contribute
hard empirical evidence-not wishful thinking or even logical
inference-on behalf of a case for organizing vastly better societies.

In that vein, this new research is entirely consistent with work on the
nature of authentic love and the concrete expression of that love in the
form of care, effort, responsibility, courage and respect. As Eagleton
reminds us, if others are also engaging in this behavior, ". . . the
result is a form of reciprocal service which provides the context for
each self to flourish. The traditional name for this reciprocity is
love." Because reciprocity mandates equality and an end to exploitation
and oppression, it follows that "a just, compassionate treatment of
other people is on the grand scale of things one of the conditions for
one's own thriving." And as social animals, when we act in this way we
are realizing our natures "at their finest." (2007, pp. 170, 159-160,
and 173) Again, the political question remains that of realizing a form
of global environment that enhances the opportunity for our nature to
flourish.

I've noted elsewhere, Fromm's classic book The Art of Loving is a
blistering indictment of the social and economic forces that deny us
life's most rewarding experience and "the only satisfying answer to the
problem of human existence." For Fromm, grasping how society shapes our
human instincts, hence our behavior, is in turn the key to understanding
why "love thy neighbor," the love of the stranger, is so elusive in
modern society.

The global capitalist culture with its premium on accumulation and
profits not only devalues an empathic disposition but produces a stunted
character in which everything is transformed into a commodity, not only
things, but individuals themselves. The very capacity to practice
empathy (love) is subordinated to our state religion of the market in
which each person seeks advantage in an alienating and endless
commodity-greedy competition.

Over five decades ago, Fromm persuasively argued that "The principles of
capitalist society and the principles of love are incompatible." (Fromm,
1956, p. 110). Any honest person knows that the dominant features of
capitalist society tend to produce individuals who are estranged from
themselves, crippled personalities robbed of their humanity and in a
constant struggle to express empathic love. Little wonder that Fromm
believed radical changes in our social structure and economic
institutions were needed if empathy/love is to be anything more than a
rare individual achievement and a socially marginal phenomenon. He
understood that only when the economic system serves women and men,
rather than the opposite, will this be possible (Olson, 2006).

***

The dominant cultural narrative of hyper-individualism is challenged and
the insidiously effective scapegoating of human nature that claims we
are motivated by greedy, dog-eat-dog "individual self-interest is all"
is undermined. From original sin to today's "selfish gene," certain
interpretations of human nature have invariably functioned to retard
class consciousness. These new research findings help to refute the
allegation that people are naturally uncooperative, an argument
frequently employed to intimidate and convince people that it's futile
to seek a better society for everyone. Stripped of yet another
rationalization for empire, predatory behavior on behalf of the
capitalist mode of production becomes ever more transparent. And
learning about the conscious suppression of this essential core of our
nature should beg additional troubling questions about the motives
behind other elite-generated ideologies, from neo-liberalism to the "war
on terror."

Second, there are implications for students. Cultivating empathic
engagement through education remains a poorly understood enterprise.
College students, for example, may hear the 'cry of the people' but the
moral sound waves are muted as they pass through a series of powerful
cultural baffles. Williams (1986, p. 143) notes that "While they may be
models of compassion and generosity to those in their immediate circles,
many of our students today have a blind spot for their responsibilities
in the socio-political order. In the traditional vocabulary they are
strong on charity but weak on justice."

Nussbaum (1997) defends American liberal education's record at
cultivating an empathic imagination. She claims that understanding the
lives of strangers and achieving cosmopolitan global citizenship can be
realized through the arts and literary humanities. There is little solid
evidence to substantiate this optimism. My own take on empathy-enhancing
practices within U.S. colleges and universities is considerably less
sanguine. Nussbaum's episodic examples of stepping into the mental shoes
of other people are rarely accompanied by plausible answers as why these
people may be lacking shoes-or decent jobs, minimum healthcare, and
long-life expectancy. The space within educational settings has been
egregiously underutilized, in part, because we don't know enough about
propitious interstices where critical pedagogy could make a difference.
Arguably the most serious barrier is the cynical, even despairing doubt
about the existence of a moral instinct for empathy. The new research
puts this doubt to rest and rightly shifts the emphasis to strategies
for cultivating empathy and identifying with "the other." Joining the
affective and cognitive dimensions of empathy may require risky forms of
radical pedagogy (Olson, 2006, 2007; Gallo, 1989). Evidence produced
from a game situation with medical students strongly hints that empathic
responses can be significantly enhanced by increased knowledge about the
specific needs of others-in this case, the elderly (Varkey, 2006).
Presumably, limited prior experiences would affect one's emotional
response. Again, this is a political culture/information acquisition
issue that demands further study.

Third, for many people the basic incompatibility between global
capitalism and the lived expression of moral sentiments may become
obvious for the first time. (Olson, 2006, 2005) For example, the failure
to engage this moral sentiment has radical implications, not the least
being consequences for the planet. Within the next 100 years, one-half
of all species now living will be extinct. Great apes, polar bears,
tigers and elephants are all on the road to extinction due to rapacious
growth, habitat destruction, and poaching. These human activities, not
random extinction, will be the undoing of millions of years of evolution
(Purvis, 2000). As Leakey puts it, "Whatever way you look at it, we're
destroying the Earth at a rate comparable with the impact of a giant
asteroid slamming into the planet..." And researchers at McGill
University have shown that economic inequality is linked to high rates
of biodiversity loss. The authors suggest that economic reforms may be
the prerequisite to saving the richness of the ecosystem and urge that
"... if we can learn to share the economic resources more fairly with
fellow members of our own species, it may help to share ecological
resources with our fellow species." (Mikkelson, 2007, p. 5)

While one hesitates imputing too much transformative potential to this
emotional capacity, there is nothing inconsistent about drawing more
attention to inter-species empathy and eco-empathy. The latter may be
essential for the protection of biotic communities. Decety and Lamm
(2006, p. 4) remind us that "... one of the most striking aspects of
human empathy is that it can be felt for virtually any target, even
targets of a different species."

This was foreshadowed at least fifty years ago when Paul Mattick,
writing about Kropotkin's notion of mutual aid, noted that "... For a
long time, however, survival in the animal world has not depended upon
the practice of either mutual aid or competition but has been determined
by the decisions of men as to which species should live and thrive and
which should be exterminated. ... [W]herever man rules, the "laws of
nature" with regard to animal life cease to exist." This applies no less
to humans and Mattick rightly observed that the demands of capital
accumulation and capitalist social relations override and preclude
mutual aid. As such, neuroscience findings are welcome and necessary but
insufficient in themselves. For empathy to flourish requires the
elimination of class relations (Mattick, 1956, pp. 2-3).

Fourth, equally alarming for elites, awareness of this reality contains
the potential to encourage "destabilizing" but humanity-affirming
cosmopolitan attitudes toward the faceless "other," both here and
abroad. In de Waal's apt words, "Empathy can override every rule about
how to treat others." (de Waal, 2005, p. 9) Amin (2003), for example,
proposes that the new Europe be reframed by an ethos of empathy and
engagement with the stranger as its core value. The diminution of
empathy within the culture reduces pro-social behavior and social
cohesiveness. Given the dangerous centrifugal forces of
ethno-nationalism and xenophobia, nothing less than this unifying motif
will suffice, while providing space for a yet undefined Europe, a people
to come.

Finally, as de Waal observes, "If we could manage to see people on other
continents as part of us, drawing them into our circle of reciprocity
and empathy, we would be building upon rather than going against our
nature." (de Waal, 2005, p. 9) An ethos of empathy is an essential part
of what it means to be human and empathically impaired societies,
societies that fail to gratify this need should be found wanting. We've
been systematically denied a deeper and more fulfilling engagement with
this moral sentiment. I would argue that the tremendous amount of
deception and fraud expended on behalf of overriding empathy is a cause
for hope and cautious optimism. Paradoxically, the relative absence of
widespread empathic behavior is in fact a searing tribute to its
potentially subversive power.

Is it too much to hope that we're on the verge of discovering a
scientifically based, Archimedean moral point from which to lever public
discourse toward an appreciation of our true nature, which in turn might
release powerful emancipatory forces?

Acknowledgement:

A highly abbreviated version of this paper appeared at Zmag (5/20/07).
Helpful comments were offered by N. Chomsky, D. Dunn, M. Iacoboni, K.
Kelly, S. Preston and J. Wingard. Thanks, per usual, to M. Ortiz.

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Gary Olson is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political
Science, Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA. He can be reached at:
olson at moravian.edu. Read other articles by Gary, or visit Gary's
website.


 
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