Abraham Pais was one of the lucky European Jews. He was a brilliant Dutch-Jewish physicist who, after the war, gained a professorship at Princeton and then at Rockefeller University; he died only in 2001. When the Germans marched into Holland in May 1940, the first anti-Jewish measure imposed by the occupying force was a ban on Jews visiting the cinema. At the time of the Nazi invasion, Pais remembered thinking, ‘So what? So we can’t see movies any more.’ Within a year, Dutch Jews were required to have a letter ‘J’ stamped in their passport, soon after to wear the yellow star, and then a ban was placed on their graduating from a university. By working day and night, Abraham just about completed his Ph.D. in time with a thesis good enough to attract the attention of the great Nils Bohr in Denmark. But Abraham, of course, could not leave Holland voluntarily to visit him. Soon, the Nazi grip tightened and the deportations started, at a trickle initially.
For some time it seemed that high-flying academics such as Pais had a measure of protection, but he distrusted the promises given by the Nazi authorities. Both he and his girlfriend Tineke agreed that he should go into hiding. Tineke was a medical student whom Abraham had met at the beginning of the war while working on his Ph.D. She was not Jewish, a fact that incurred the wrath of Abraham’s orthodox father, but after meeting her he grew to like her, and Abraham and Tineke’s relationship became more serious. She would be instrumental in saving his life.
Tineke persuaded some friends to shelter Abraham in their large house on a canal in central Amsterdam. In the attic they built a hiding place with a false wall. After nine months a Gestapo officer arrived at the house and demanded to search it. Abraham hurriedly climbed into the hiding place and pulled the false wall onto the hole, but it would not fit properly. The German searched the attic, but he did not spot the gap in the wall, or Abraham huddling terrified behind it, watching him. Someone had told the authorities or passed on gossip and betrayed him. Abraham had no choice but to find somewhere else to hide.
Thereafter, Abraham hid with no fewer than nine different families in succession. Tineke collected food coupons for him and borrowed books from public libraries. Abraham rarely ventured outside and spent his time reading, thinking and worrying about his parents. From being a perfectly respectable, law-abiding, fairly well-to-do young man from a good family, he was now a hunted animal with all the instincts to match. Almost the worst part was not knowing how long the occupation would last, or indeed whether it would continue for ever.
In March 1945, after more than two years in hiding, the Gestapo caught Abraham and he was incarcerated – in what state we can only imagine. His initial interrogation lasted thirty-six hours, shows of friendship and empathy alternating with physical threats. He went all that time without food or rest. Of these hours, he wrote, ‘Never in my whole life was I more afraid than on the day I went into that prison. The fear was like a physical pain. I couldn’t tell you where it hurt, but I remember everything hurting. My body hurt with the pain of fear.’ But, almost miraculously, that same week the Allied forces crossed the Rhine and cut off the northern part of Holland. All rail routes to the concentration camps in Germany were cut off and within a month the Germans had retreated. Abraham was released, and days later Holland was liberated by the Canadians.
Abraham’s parents also hid in the homes of non-Jews, and they too survived the war, although Abraham’s sister and other members of his family were sent to the death camps. By the end of the war four out of every five Dutch Jews were dead. These stories were common across Europe. Of my stepfather’s immediate family in the same predicament, thirty-seven members disappeared into the camps. Only one survived Auschwitz, but three survived by hiding with altruistic non-Jews.
None of the many families with whom Abraham stayed were close friends, yet his story is typical of several survivors I have met. Ordinary people put their own lives and the lives of their children in great danger in order to help Jews. They risked betrayal that could lead to their imprisonment or execution. Tineke, too, lived under the constant threat of Gestapo investigations. Those who have read the diary of Anne Frank will be well aware of the huge tensions harbouring Jews caused in these families.
Many of the ‘Righteous Gentiles’ who helped the Jews in occupied Europe are honoured at the Holocaust Memorial museum, Yad V’Shem, in Jerusalem where more than six thousand trees have been planted in their name. They stand as a testament to the ability of human beings to help others at great cost to themselves, to our capacity for real altruism, indeed sheer heroism. From where did this capacity emerge, and how? It is a fine human quality that appears to be at odds with our selfish genes as well as our self-interested strategies for co-operation and reciprocity.
Appearances, of course, can be deceptive. I find it difficult to believe that the heroism of the Gentile rescuers is merely an illusion. I do not accept the famous cynicism of Beaumarchais when he said that drinking without being thirsty and making love at any time are the only things that distinguish us from other animals. For years, philosophers and pig farmers alike have assumed that humans alone are capable of ‘pure’ altruism – behaviour that is solely for the benefit of others – and a keenly felt moral sensibility. It is slightly disconcerting, therefore, to find that these ‘human’ qualities appear to be present in the behaviour of other species.
We have already seen how many different animals, even those low down on the evolutionary tree, show some form of altruistic behaviour, sometimes without obvious motives of self-interest. But what of those animals with a brain which is rather more comparable to that of humans and who live in a more advanced society?
Dolphins, for example, are thought to be very intelligent animals, with a large brain relative to their body size. They have a family structure and live in clearly organized groups. They communicate with one another using something akin to language. Dolphins show a number of traits which are reminiscent of human behaviour. For example, the synchronized swimming for which dolphins are so famous is not, as is often supposed, just a beautiful form of travel. When two or more dolphins swim in unison and leap gracefully in the air in identical arcs, these are nearly always new groups of young males, showing off. Very often they are signalling to other dolphins that they are ‘the new gang in town’ in an aggressive attempt to be a hit with impressionable females. But adult dolphins do clearly care for one another; they will co-operate to ward off a perceived threat rather than just dive for cover. Most impressively, it seems they will gather together to lift a wounded member of the group to the surface of the water so that it can breathe regularly.
Is there evidence of feelings of empathy in some primates? In 1964, Jules Masserman, a famous psychiatrist in Chicago, and his colleagues studied whether rhesus monkeys would forgo food if they knew that by securing the food another monkey would suffer an electric shock. Monkeys were placed in individual cages. Each cage had two levers, one of which when pulled caused a reward of food to be delivered into its cage. However, pulling this lever had an additional effect: an electric shock was delivered to a monkey in the next-door cage. The second lever did not result in any electric shocks being given, but when it was pulled only half the amount of food was delivered. Most monkeys preferred to pull the lever that did not shock their neighbour, even though they were not getting enough to eat. This kind of altruistic behaviour was more likely if the monkey being tested had been cage mates or if they themselves had previously experienced an electric shock. One monkey refrained from eating under such circumstances for twelve days, and generally these rhesus monkeys were almost willing to starve themselves rather than cause another monkey’s distress.
It would be unwise to draw too many conclusions from this early experiment. Ideally, it needs to be carefully repeated. But I am confident that now most human experimenters would be very dubious about the ethicality of conducting an experiment of this sort and that more sophisticated, painless research could be carried out in order to evaluate these interesting observations.
Great apes have been seen to show compassion towards members of another species. Those who have seen gorillas in captivity will know how frightening they can be, how large and how aggressive to human intrusion into their territory. Binti Jua, a seven-year-old female western lowland gorilla at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, who was carrying her own baby at the time, rescued a three-year-old boy who had fallen over the wall into the gorilla enclosure. He dropped eighteen feet onto the concrete floor, hit his head and lay there unconscious. Binti Jua picked up the child, carried him gently and placed him near a door within easy reach of zoo staff. He was then taken to hospital, where he made a speedy recovery.
Bonobos, which are rather rare, are apes closely related to chimpanzees. They are thought to be man’s closest living relative. Remarkably, the bonobo was discovered only in 1929; the largest colony live in Zaire. With its long legs and small head atop narrow shoulders, the bonobo has a more delicate build than a chimpanzee. Bonobo lips are reddish in a black face, the ears small and the nostrils almost as wide as a gorilla’s. These primates also have a flatter, more open face with a higher forehead than the chimpanzee’s, and, to top it all off, long, fine, black hair neatly parted in the middle. They are particularly playful, quite promiscuous, and are more intelligent than either gorillas or chimpanzees.
One bonobo female called Kuni, in Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire, UK, once caught an injured starling. She took the bird and carefully set it on the ground, but it refused to move. Kuni picked it up and gently threw it into the air, but it still would not fly away. Kuni carried the starling to the top of the highest tree in the enclosure. She cautiously extended the bird’s wings and then threw it into the air, but still the bird would not fly out of the enclosure. From then on Kuni protected it, especially when a juvenile bonobo started to get curious and would have harmed it.
Frans de Waal and his colleague Jessica Flack are convinced that human morality has deep roots in our primate past. ‘While there is no denying that we are creatures of intellect,’ they say, ‘it is also clear that we are born with powerful inclinations and emotions that bias our thinking and behaviour. It is in this area that many of the continuities with other animals lie.’ For de Waal and Flack, the ‘proto-moral’ behaviour shown by Kuni and other apes forms the building blocks for the evolution of a human moral sensibility. So why are human beings so concerned about other people? Is our much-prized concern for our fellow man just a more sophisticated version of the behaviour observed in Juni and Binti Jua?
In order to have a sense of morality we need to understand the state of mind of other people. There is a key moment in the development of children when they begin to grasp that other people have different desires, intentions or beliefs to themselves. A classic experiment involves acting out the following scene in front of a child, usually with puppets. Fred, the first puppet, is inside a room holding a chocolate bar. He hides the chocolate under a cushion, then leaves the room. The second puppet, Annie, comes into the room, takes the chocolate bar out from under the cushion and puts it in her basket. When Fred walks back into the room, the child is asked: where will Fred look for the chocolate? Very young infants think that Fred will know what they know – that the chocolate is in Annie’s basket. However, older children, by the age of about four, realize that Fred will look under the cushion. They are beginning to understand that different individuals are capable of making different actions and having different motivations from themselves.
But a few children never manage to make the distinction and will always have great difficulty when it comes to divining the thoughts or feelings of others. They lack what is called a ‘theory of mind’, an ability to see another person’s point of view. Simon Baron-Cohen, clinical psychologist at the University of Cambridge, has called this condition ‘mindblindness’. He believes that this is what is missing in the brains of autistic people.
Some autistic people have great insight into their own condition. One young man was reported to say that he was ‘always putting his foot in it’, that he envied other people’s ability to read other people’s minds and predict their reactions, thus avoiding upsetting them. Autistic children can understand physical desires like hunger or thirst, and they can make the link from these desires to feelings of sadness, for example, or feelings of pain or discomfort. But these connections are not instinctive, and severely autistic people cannot read the meaning of facial expressions at all. Baron-Cohen cites several examples of high-achieving people who lack this ability; for example, a professor of Mathematics who had won a Field Medal, the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize, could not decode facial expressions from photographs of actors. (Baron-Cohen is developing a system to ‘teach’ facial expressions to autistic children using a CD-ROM with photographs of actors. They have to be learned, just like the letters of the alphabet or the names of colours.)
If a child points to an object as if to say ‘look at that’, there is a good chance they are not autistic. By pointing, the child is attempting to divert a person’s attention to an object and is recognizing that his or her point of view differs. Gaze direction is an extremely important ability for communicating and understanding others.1 From the age of twelve months normally developed babies instinctively follow a person’s gaze if it quickly changes direction. Infants will often flick from the adult’s eyes to the object the adult is looking at. We have a finely tuned ability to detect whether someone is looking at us, and if not, where in fact they are looking. Remember years ago when your prescient teacher, writing on the blackboard, told you to stop fiddling, that she had ‘eyes at the back of her head’?
Autism is a physical syndrome, not a moral failure. Its main component seems to be a lack of empathy. So far, it has been pretty much impervious to any convincing neurological explanation, but a recent discovery may provide a first tantalizing glimpse of the mechanisms behind our capacity for empathy and our ‘theory of mind’.
Various animal species can learn how to do certain actions by watching other animals first. I joined zoologist Dr Culum Brown of the Department of Animal Behaviour in Cambridge recently to see him experimenting with some very young brown trout. You may not have appreciated that fish have fun watching television; the glass tanks of Brown’s baby trout were close to a fifteen-inch television screen on which he was playing a videotape of a slightly older trout eating a red worm. Before seeing this tape, the baby trout had never eaten a red worm; these young trout started to take an interest in the red worms that had been dropping into their tank only after watching this piscine version of the Naked Chef.
Imitation in the primate world is much more sophisticated, as you’d expect. Humans as well as some species of monkey can learn to perform a task – say, hitting a nut with a stone – by watching another person (or ape) perform the same task and copying them. But this process of imitation may give us much more than merely a useful ability to learn how to crack a nut.
Thanks to research in the early 1990s by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma, we are beginning to glean insights into some of the underlying foundations of empathy and our theory of mind. Their discovery was the result of a combination of a wonderful moment of serendipity and a keen eye for the significant detail. Initially, Rizzolatti was not looking into the phenomenon of imitation or empathy; instead, he simply wanted to investigate the pattern of brain activity in macaque monkeys when they performed a certain motor task, such as reaching out a hand for food. A neural structure in the frontal lobe called F5, in the pre-motor cortex, is especially active when the monkey is making certain movements such as picking up or biting an object. The researchers wanted to find out if F5 activity changed depending on the size of the object, so they encouraged the monkeys to pick up pieces of apple, raisins, paper clips, and so on, all the while monitoring neural activity in the pre-motor cortex.
In the midst of this experiment the researchers noticed something rather unusual. They realized that F5 was active not only when the monkey was performing the task, but also when the researcher was picking up the object, so as to move it closer to the monkey. Furthermore, the pattern of activity was virtually identical to when the monkey picked up the object for itself. Rizzolatti and his fellow researchers were quick to realize the significance of this activity. After further testing they found that F5 brainwaves were extremely specific to the task in hand: the neurons would fire one way when the researchers were holding pieces of apple in their hand, and another way when they placed them down on a plate. It was as though the monkey was replaying the task in its own mind. Rizzolatti called these structures in the frontal lobe ‘mirror neurons’.
Other researchers around the world set out to discover if humans had similar mechanisms in their brains. Firstly, it was determined that when we watch someone gripping an object, for example, muscles in our own hands tense slightly as though we are priming them to perform the same action. Indeed, it is possible to catch oneself twitching, involuntarily, in sympathy with another person’s movement. We may make the movement to kick a nonexistent ball when watching a player with whom we closely identify attempt to score in a match. When watching a film, have you ever started to duck when a villain throws a punch at Clint Eastwood?
Subsequently, brain imaging studies showed that mirror neurons apparently do exist in the human brain. Vilayanur Ramachandran and colleagues at the University of California at San Diego have conducted an experiment that involves the suppression of certain brainwaves. There are a variety of electrical wave patterns in the brain, of which one type, called mu waves, are found in the motor cortex. These are associated with movement or the intention to move but are blocked when a person moves his or her hand. They discovered that mu waves are also repressed when we watch someone else move his or her hand. The reason for this would appear to be some kind of imitative function. Rizzolatti, too, has conducted experiments that show similar patterns of brain activity between ‘doing’ and ‘watching’.
A relevant part of the brain in humans is Broca’s Area, a structure that is used for the production of speech. This discovery was especially intriguing. Rizzolatti proposed that mirror neurons could be the connection between action and communication. Since these structures seem to allow us to interpret and recognize another person’s actions, they may be implicated in the development of communication and speech. Perhaps, says Rizzolatti, involuntary twitching in sympathy might have been the first step in terms of gestures and hand movements that finally led to vocalized speech.
Ramachandran is confident that the discovery of mirror neurons in Broca’s Area will yield abundant insights into the evolution of the human mind. ‘I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology,’ he says. ‘They will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.’ He thinks that mirror neurons may be partly responsible for a crucial moment of human evolution called the ‘Great Leap Forward’. Somewhere between forty-five and seventy-five thousand years ago there were the beginnings of symbolic art, followed by a significant jump in the complexity of tools and weapons and the invention of rituals such as burying the dead with beads and flowers. The only reason, says Ramachandran, that these cultural advances ‘stuck’ in the minds and memories of the population was because we had the capability to imitate and understand the actions of others, in the same way that a language can only become lodged in the minds of a population if the bulk of the population has the ability to learn quickly and easily.
But could these mirror neurons have a role beyond that of mentally imitating and then replicating the actions or speech of another person? Could they play a role in a ‘deep’ form of empathy – putting oneself emotionally in the place of another?
Ramachandran has run the ‘mu wave’ experiment with autistic children. His preliminary results show that the mu waves are not repressed when an autistic child watches someone move a hand. In other words, they may not have the same functioning mirror neurons as the rest of us. This is one enticing explanation of their difficulty in understanding the point of view of others.
If we can replicate the simple movements of another person in our own mind, it follows that we can replicate a sense of pain or pleasure too. Most of us are aware of wincing when we see a person stub his or her toe, or when we watch someone having a tooth pulled out. Some people imagine that doctors get so used to seeing other people in pain that they tend to become less feeling; consequently, it has been suggested that their mirror neurons may become desensitized. There is no evidence for this; in any case, I personally think that doctors do continue to feel, but learn that it’s generally not in their patients’ interests to show that they feel. But it raises an interesting question about those extraordinary people who are prepared to submit others to torture. It is even more curious to consider that it is frequently said that the most successful torturers are those who pretend to show empathy with their victims, at least for part of the time. What happens to their mirror neurons?
Mirror neurons may well be the key to our ability to understand the emotional state of mind of another person. We have the ability to ‘read’ other people’s minds, we can put ourselves in someone else’s place, and to an extent we can understand their experiences, whether pleasurable or painful. It is a talent that starts early in life. After twelve months, babies will start to interpret their environment through the eyes of another; if a parent has a look of fear or disgust when they look at a toy, the child will generally avoid it. Infants as young as three years old will comfort their mothers if they are crying. These actions are the very beginnings of human empathy.
An assumption of game theory, especially as applied to economics, is that rational behaviour is self-interested. Emotions, and particularly emotions such as empathy, are thought to be a hindrance to the real business of looking after number one. In real life, however, rationality does not ignore emotion; the two combine to create complex and fiendishly unpredictable behaviour. This, perhaps, is coming close to the essence of what it means to be human.
The ‘Ultimatum Game’ is played by two people. One is given some money by the experimenter, say ten pounds. The two players are told that if they agree on how to split the money between them, each will be allowed to keep his or her share. The rules are simple. Player One is told to make a proposal to Player Two on how to split the money. The offered share could be anything between one penny and ten pounds. Player Two can either accept this offer, in which case he or she keeps the cash, or refuse, in which case neither player gets any money. Player Two has no control over the share of the money that is offered and there’s no chance to repeat the game.
Rationally, from a purely financial point of view, it makes sense to accept whatever share Player One offers, but in real life, with real people, that is not what happens. If the offer is low, Player Two will often refuse to accept it, thus ruining the chances for both players to keep any money; on average, around 20 per cent of people reject the offer. We can put this down to feelings of spite. Contrary to rational self-interest, they would rather lose the money than be given an inequitable share.
Conversely, self-interest should make Player One choose to offer a low share. He or she must weigh up the chances of Player Two spitefully refusing the offer, but there is no good reason to split the money evenly. Yet in repeated experiments people offer, on average, between 45 and 50 per cent of the money. It is interesting that the average offer, and the likelihood of the offer being refused, does differ from country to country. South Americans, for example, tended to offer less – 35 per cent on average – and were also half as likely to reject the offer.2 Even taking the chances of refusal into account, this is far beyond the amount one may think would guarantee Player Two’s acceptance of the offer. Players are motivated by more than the desire to maximize their winnings.
This experiment seems to show that we have a sense of fairness predisposing us to share a reward even with a complete stranger. The other side of the coin to a sense of fairness is a feeling of guilt. If we walk away with ninety-five out of a hundred pounds we may feel guilty at exploiting our ‘opponent’.
Our sense of fairness is underlined by a stripped-down variant of the Ultimatum Game called the Dictator Game. In this game Player Two has to accept whatever share he or she is given, and Player One, therefore, can divide the money however he or she likes without worrying about losing his or her share. But even then, approximately one sixth of the players divided the money evenly, despite their complete power to ‘dictate’ the outcome. Our instinct for co-operation brings with it an inclination towards fairness, as well as feelings of anger or spite if someone does not display fairness towards us.
These money games are played out, of course, as if we are rational agents in a laboratory setting. And, of course, the subjects playing these games know they are being watched and their actions recorded. Even under these circumstances, human beings may seem to be morally wanting, but often seem to be fair. We are not automata who maximize our own gain no matter what the situation. And in everyday life all kinds of ‘fuzzy’ variables come into play. These feelings of fairness and guilt act as extremely useful regulators of our capacity to reciprocate and forge alliances.
You may have all kinds of informal, even unstated, systems of favours with your neighbour. You may, for example, take his children to school every morning, because it is on your way to work. He, on the other hand, is a keen gardener and is happy to weed and water your garden when you are away. No contract has been signed, and there is no hard and fast set of rules surrounding the arrangement; the system will depend on your instinctive feelings of fairness and guilt. If your neighbour is not pulling his weight, ultimately you will discontinue the agreement, even though the cost of giving the children a lift is minimal. Similarly, if you are unable to carry out your side of the bargain you may feel guilt and try to make up for it.
But this is more or less tit for tat. What about altruistic behaviour which does not expect anything in return? Does what I shall call ‘pure’ altruism really exist? If so, what lies behind it?
Samuel Oliner is the founder of the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behaviour Institute. Over many years, his work has investigated altruistic behaviour in, for example, people who rescued Jews in the Second World War, Carnegie Medal awardees and philanthropists. He lists the qualities he believes may be involved:
Parental role modelling, courage, empathy, learning caring norms, a prevailing moral code that one does not stand by and see another human being perish, self-esteem, social responsibility, self-efficacy, a sense of justice, a feeling that one can make a difference, intrinsic religious factors, agape [fellowship or brotherhood], inclusiveness of others in the sphere of the rescuer’s/helper’s responsibility, need to help the community, the need for affiliation, self-enhancement, and reduction of guilt.
These, surely, are attributes largely associated with upbringing, i.e. nurture. Do we not return once more to the unresolved arguments between nature and nurture? It is not an easy task to untangle the altruistic impulse, especially when we are dealing with rare and extraordinary acts of kindness or heroism.
The Carnegie Medal is awarded to civilians in the United States and Canada who have risked their lives for strangers. Andrew Carnegie established the fund in 1904 after an accident in one of his mines killed 186 workers. He was impressed by the heroic attempts to rescue those trapped in the mine and set up a fund to reward similar acts of bravery. The medal has been given to over eight and a half thousand people and the latest list of recipients is representative. There is a Colorado postman who saw a runaway car containing a seven-year-old boy approaching certain collision at a busy junction. He ran after the car and dived through the open window to pull on the brake. There are four men who almost drowned in their efforts to save a boy from being swept away by strong currents on Lake Michigan. There is the father and son who ran into a burning house three times to try to save children trapped on the upper floors.
Most of these people had little time to consider the consequences of their actions. They simply jumped into turbulent water or ran into the burning house. To wait and think would have meant serious injury or death for the people in trouble. We would say they acted on instinct, but is it an instinct in the sense that we have used the word throughout this book? Does it stem from a genetic impulse that can be traced back to our evolutionary roots?
An element of heroic behaviour, particularly male heroics, may come down to sex. Women, as we have discussed, may prefer the fireman to the supermarket manager; most of all (it is believed) they just prefer George Clooney in ER. The biology of sexual selection influences all kinds of risky behaviour, and heroic behaviour is no exception. Clearly, the Carnegie Medal winners were not thinking about impressing women, but it would be wrong to ignore the impact of sexual selection and competition; nor should we forget Zahavi’s Handicap Principle. Zahavi would say that risky behaviour, especially for the purpose of helping another person, is a perfect method of advertising one’s high-quality genes. It is better even than the peacock’s tail, because it plays on other people’s instincts for empathy. We are attuned to other people’s pain and admire those who can put a stop to it. But Zahavi’s theory still holds altruism to be essentially self-interested, because it is derived from sexual selection. People get excited by the sexiness of heroic behaviour. Hollywood executives, it is said, have a rule about action heroes such as James Bond or Indiana Jones: they dictate that women should want to sleep with him and men should want to be him.
Suddenly, it all sounds rather cynical. Great acts of human kindness have been reduced to an exploitative tactic for enhancing one’s attractiveness to the opposite sex. Frans de Waal calls it a profound paradox that ‘genetic self-advancement at the expense of others – which is the basic thrust of evolution – has given rise to remarkable capacities for caring and sympathy’. I am not sure it is a paradox, but it is certainly ironic.
The most self-interested drive in human psychology, sex, may be heavily involved in the most selfless acts of heroism. The key word here is ‘involved’. Sexual selection does not run the show. In the rich and unpredictable world of human behaviour, no-one is a prisoner of his or her genes. But their presence will always be felt.
Most of us harbour a hope that pure altruism, unaffected by any selfish impulse, exists in human life. Nevertheless, we may feel that even the most devoted and humble of hospice volunteers, anonymous donors or committed rescue workers perform good deeds partly because of some feelings of pride, guilt or shame, or perhaps they get a risk-taking thrill.3 But we should still admire them, because they fight on the front lines of altruism, and most of us do not.
Kristen Renwick Monroe is Professor of Politics and Associate Director of the Program in Political Psychology at the University of California at Irvine. Her academic life is spent trying to understand moral values and the nature of altruism. Her story of one Carnegie Medal winner, Lucille Babcock, is told in her Pulitzer-nominated book The Heart of Altruism.
In July 1987, Lucille, sixty-five at the time and living in Little Rock, Arkansas, was in her office editing the poetry column for her local newspaper when she heard screaming outside. She looked through the window and saw a man dragging a young woman by her ponytail across the road. There was no-one else in sight. Lucille had moderate heart failure which left her breathless and incapable of strenuous physical activity; she also had old injuries to her back and legs which necessitated wearing braces, making her even more immobile. Still, she did not hesitate. Grabbing her cane, she hobbled down two flights of stairs. She describes how she thought her heart would burst through her efforts. The man had already torn the clothes off his victim and was choking her by the time Lucille arrived at the scene. She swung her cane, shouting to the young woman to escape, but the man would not stop. Lucille remembered that she felt she might die ‘because he was so vicious-looking … I’m gonna kill him or he will kill me’. The thug punched her repeatedly, but she kept swinging her cane and shouting. Finally, the man tried to get into his car. Lucille, not knowing whether he had a gun, would not let him go. She slammed the car door on his hand, opened it and hit him again, all the while screaming for help. At last two men heard her screams and held the man down until the police arrived. Lucille was bruised and battered, but she had prevented somebody who was a stranger from suffering serious injuries.
One thing in particular stands out. When she was struggling with the man, she remembers vividly that two women drove past in different cars. Both of these drivers slowed down to look, but once they realized what was going on they accelerated and drove away – away from an elderly woman who was calling for help while being punched and kicked by a man who had clearly been sexually assaulting a half-naked, semi-collapsed, twenty-year-old girl.
Monroe has spent years studying all kinds of ‘altruists’, from impulsive heroes to long-term philanthropists. She detects some common threads in their feelings towards helping others. Firstly, they do not direct their altruism towards any particular group. There is no interest necessarily in protecting the interests of their ‘group’ – their fellow nationals, or people of their own race, class or religion. Secondly, Lucille, and other people who have performed similar acts of altruism, say that they ‘had no choice’. But, of course, they did have a choice and although they did not necessarily have any rationally considered moral argument, their overriding feeling was to help the person in need. I doubt that this is merely due to instinct.
Lucille’s story illustrates that even though most of us are capable of empathy and most of us have feelings of fairness and guilt, pure altruism is less common. Even if we have altruistic intentions, we may lack the courage to see them through. So where altruism exists, it should be treasured. It has its instinctual roots in an ability to understand the pain and pleasure experienced by others; it will be nurtured by our upbringing and our moral environment. Ultimately, though, it is our capacity to combine instinct, emotion and reason that gives us the facility to perform these remarkable acts.
Humans have attempted to create legal systems since the beginning of recorded history. The remarkable discovery of one of the earliest was made in 1901. A French archaeological team lead by Jean-Vincent Scheil was working in Susa, in Iran – the ancient city, incidentally, where Queen Esther petitioned her king, Ahasuerus (see here). During their excavations they found a massive black stone, broken in three pieces, with cuneiform inscriptions. It was the Stone of Hammurabi,4 from around 1750 BC, the first recorded legal and moral code. Hammurabi was the Mesopotamian king who established the dominance of Babylon, perhaps the first great metropolis. This huge monolith had ended up at Susa because at some time after 1700 BC it was carried off from Babylon after the city was sacked by the Elamites.
History suggests older legal and moral instructions, but this is the earliest written record we have of a ruler proclaiming an entire body of laws, arranged in orderly groups, so that all might read and know what was required of them. This code of 282 separate laws begins and ends with addresses to the gods. A law code was a subject for prayer, though the prayers here are chiefly curses directed at those who might neglect or destroy the law. Much of the code deals with the organization of society. The judge who blunders in a law case is to be barred for ever, and heavily fined. A false witness is subject to death. If a builder constructs a house which falls down, killing its owner, he is to be slain. If the owner’s son is killed, the builder’s son is slain too. Indeed, all the more serious crimes are punishable by death. None of these dread statutes – whose morality, the product of modern man’s adolescence, we would now undoubtedly question – allows excuses or explanations, with one striking exception. An accused person was allowed to cast himself into ‘the river’ (the Euphrates – could swimming have been unknown in those times?). If the current bore the defendant to the shore alive he was declared innocent; if he drowned he was guilty. So faith in the justice of the ruling gods was already established in the minds of men.
One important area was the regulation of family life. The Babylonians punished desertion by a husband or wife and legislated for adultery, adoption of children, inheritance of property and other issues affecting the family. There are many equivalents in virtually all human societies which reflect some of our broad conclusions about how early humans might have behaved. Protecting the integrity of the family unit was extremely important. It meant children were more likely to live through childhood and it cemented the group and kin network.
Hammurabi’s code is an outline of what was regarded then as moral. It stressed co-operation between members of society. Negligence, theft, adultery and jealousy were as damaging for the Babylonians as they were for archaic Homo sapiens. Virtually every single system of ethics invented since has tried to find a way to provide a good reason for people not to be selfish.
Paul Ehrlich, the distinguished Stanford University biologist who won the prestigious Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, believes that every ethical system originated in the human mind, a biological entity. He does not think, like many dualist philosophers, that there are moral truths out there, waiting to be discovered, that are distinct and independent of the messy mass of neurons that house the human mind. We are bound to our empirical existence, and our moral sense is therefore grounded firmly in the human world.
Ehrlich concedes that the capacity to construct a moral system is a product of evolution. We can imagine the consequences of our actions, think about alternatives, and imagine what others are feeling. All these are valuable qualities, and with free will are preconditions for creating a moral system. But the content of that system, he believes, is not dependent on our genes. It is an outcome of human culture, and as such can take many different forms. Western parents, for example, believe that punishment of children who misbehave is perfectly reasonable. Inuit parents, on the other hand, would think it highly unethical. Within cultures, too, there are constant moral arguments over extremely important issues – euthanasia, abortion, animal rights, to name the most contentious. Why, if we all share a common evolved moral sense, do we have no consensus when it comes to these great ethical questions?
Of course, life in a hunter-gatherer encampment did not give us any experiences to answer these particular questions. Such problems only come with civilization, farming and technology. If you’re struggling to find enough to eat, no-one has time to worry about mistreating animals. Moreover, Ehrlich says, even with the benefit of several thousand years or more of ethical debate we do not even have a consensus on what the questions are, never mind the answers. Our moral frames of reference can be completely at odds. For utilitarians, the sum of the consequences is important for any particular action. Others may believe in strict moral absolutes that can never be transgressed, such as the taking of a life. Ehrlich uses the example of the tourists who are stranded in a cave by an ocean shore. The water is rising, and the only way out is through a hole that leads upwards to the clifftop. The first tourist, who is unfortunately vastly overweight, gets stuck near the top of the hole. He is out of danger, but the rest of the group cannot escape. Rescuers arrive, and they are faced with a choice: do they blow up the fat man with dynamite, killing him and saving the lives of the others, or do they use drills to free the fat man, which will save his life but seal the fate of his friends because of the time delay? Is there a right answer to this question? Does it depend on whether or not the fat man pleads with them to save his life or begs to be sacrificed?
Disraeli thought that Darwin’s theory of evolution threatened to put mankind on the side of the apes rather than on the side of the angels, and this horrified him. Disraeli’s fears live on. Creationism is the belief in the literal truth of the Book of Genesis, that the world and everything in it, from earthworms to humans, was created in six days some five thousand years ago. Creationists, whose numbers are astonishingly large in the US but seem proportionately less in the UK, are implacably opposed to the ultimate idea proposed by evolutionary theory: that all of us, humans, apes, worms, share a common ancestor. But there is a mass of extremely convincing evidence that supports all aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolution, from carbon-dating to the fossil record, from countless experiments in population genetics to computer simulations of natural selection. All the scientific evidence argues strongly that the first few chapters of Genesis cannot be taken as literal truth.
Just as the creationists, judging from the surprisingly large postbag I get from them, object vigorously to the views of scientists such as me, so there are too many scientists willing to be outraged by the opinions of the creationists. Just a few weeks before writing this chapter, I was standing in vast open countryside, miles from modern civilization (as I thought), under the hot African sun of the savannah, holding bits of two hominid skulls – one bit from A. afarensis, the other from Homo erectus. I was about to record a few words to the BBC camera facing me on the nature of instinct and how we had evolved from the two prototypes which I was clutching. Then I was visited by the surreal. My mobile phone rang. It was Richard Dawkins’ secretary in Oxford asking if I would join him in signing a letter to The Times with other scientists. They were outraged because a junior school in Newcastle had just announced publicly that it was not going to teach evolution in school, only the story of the Creation. I replied that, while I had the greatest respect for Richard Dawkins, I didn’t feel I could add my name to the letter. I tried to rescue my credentials by saying I was ‘teaching evolution’ at that very moment, but I explained that I really didn’t believe it mattered so much what this school taught. I doubted it would damage their pupils if it took them a bit longer to find out about what we believe about evolution, if they came to Darwin a little later. What concerned me more was the risk of turning more people away from rational argument, and hence from science, because of a vehement public argument which could not reflect well on the scientists and would not change the view of creationists.
And, of course, though they may be loath to admit it, scientists themselves are only believers. One of our greatest physicists, William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, affirmed fewer than ten years before the flight of the Wright brothers, ‘I can state flatly that heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.’ Among other pronouncements, he is also on record as saying, ‘Radio has no future,’ and ‘X-rays will prove to be a hoax.’
To my mind, our own certainty as scientists has sometimes been a key problem for science in the past, and often still is. We scientists tend to treat our scientific view of nature as a universal truth, and in doing so we often lose what we claim to most pride – our objectivity. When we lose our objectivity our perception of what we think we see is wrongly influenced and can be totally flawed, and the misconceptions can then be passed on to the rest of society.
A good example of what I mean arises from the droplets of seminal fluid examined by Nicolas Hartsoeker, the microscope maker and anatomist. Some time around 1694, he published the famous woodcut in his book Essay de Dioptrique which depicts a human sperm. Depicted inside the sperm head is a little homunculus, a tiny man in miniature, in the appropriate fetal position with legs drawn up, and the fontanelle prominently sketched at the front of the skull. The homunculus, a pre-existing human, was envisaged as ‘complete’ and therefore, of course, had its own gonads and spermatozoa, if a male. These, in turn, contained even more tiny humans, and so on back to the origins of the first human. This notion was enthusiastically endorsed by the famous mathematician Gottfried Leibnitz (1646–1716). He cited Hartsoeker ‘and other able men’ in support of his own idea that animals, including humans, exist pre-formed and wholly alive ‘in miniature in germs before conception’. Essentially, the idea came from an Aristotelian view that a man placed his seed in the woman’s womb, where it grew until big enough to be born. So pre-existing ignorance and bias on the part of rather naive observers, combined with the poor optics of the original microscopes, gave rise to what was a totally false observation. This is of great interest because this finding of an homunculus led some ethicists to confirm the ruling that destruction of the semen, say by masturbation, is effectively homicide.
Almost one hundred years later, in 1790, Hartsoeker’s observations prompted Rabbi Pinhas Elijah ben Meir to comment as follows in his Book of the Covenant, published in Mishnaic Hebrew:
It has been seen through the viewing instrument, called a microscope, that a drop of a man’s sperm, while in its original temperature, contains small creatures in man’s image. They live and move within the sperm. Now you can understand how right the Sages were … How strange the Talmudic idea that hash-hatat zera [destruction of the seed] is ‘like murder’ seemed to the ‘philosophers’ among us before the microscope was invented. They thought that destroying the seed is like destroying wood not yet made into a chair, not knowing that seed is potentially the ‘chair’ itself, the end product in miniature …
The ethics implicit in this statement are impeccable. If the sperm really does contain a little man, with organs complete, his sacrifice is indeed murder. The problem is, of course, that the observation is flawed. Further developments in biology have clearly shown us that the sperm is not a ‘person’ and therefore wastage or destruction of seminal fluid cannot be seen to be ‘like murder’. Our ethical attitude can only be as good as our understanding of the world around us. Just as the Code of Hammurabi now is cruel and morally outdated, it follows that religious or ethical views which are based on a false premise, faulty observation or flawed data are valueless and misleading.
The attitude of scientists who have misplaced certainty is essentially no better than the attitudes of those who profess blind faith in their right to impose their religious views on others, or of those who harass patients attending an abortion clinic in Massachusetts, or of those who used violence to prevent black people marrying with white people because these things were ‘against the Bible’. Remember the ‘science’ of eugenics and its consequences? Scientists who are certain that they are right not only fool themselves, but do greater harm. They are frequently held in respect and awe by many people, and they may poison the wells from which less well-educated people drink.
Among the many appalling threats to our society triggered by the events of 11 September 2001 was one that was almost intangible. It was the violent language which followed the massacre of innocent civilians. I would argue that one of the key causes of 11 September was the violent language of hatred which preceded these murders, language which had slowly dripped corrosively on the minds of the perpetrators and their supporters. Of course, it is difficult even now to understand the enormity of those dreadful deeds or to comprehend precisely what was in the mind of the young men who flew those aircraft into the buildings in New York. To nearly all of us they were murderers, but, paradoxically, to themselves and their followers they were martyrs.
I find it difficult and painful to write what I feel I must now set down. Richard Dawkins is a man whom I greatly admire, whom I think of with fondness and whom I am proud to believe is a friend. He wrote his analysis of the events of 11 September in the Guardian under the headline RELIGION’S MISGUIDED MISSILES. He asked where the suicide pilots’ motivation and their ‘insane courage’ came from. He was prompted to ask this question, he says, by his ‘deep grief and fierce anger’:
… It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill the world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.
Was it right to have indulged in this violent language? If only you had not written what seems such a hate-riddled piece. Is this anger truly righteous? Surely, this evil action was no more religious than the action of a deprived Catholic bomber in a café in Londonderry, a madman mowing down seventeen people with a machine gun in a shopping centre in Hungerford, a Hamas bomber killing children at a Tel Aviv bus-stop? Do you not see that ‘the religions of an Abrahamic kind’ you are always so ready to repeatedly condemn are possibly what formulated for you and the society in which you live the very moral framework you rightly respect so much – to protect life, to uphold justice, to accept human equality, to believe in mercy? Would you not concede that the events of 11 September are more to do with human instinct than any real religious observance, and that possibly what we observed on that day was, more than anything else, the ultimate manifestation of the selfish gene?
Muir Weissinger, writing in his book From Calvary to Tokyo, says, ‘Some agnostics and even militant non-believers accept that “faith” in general is an inevitable element in human evolution … it is not, it is more like an evolutionary tail that should have “dropped off” many years ago – something that is life-impeding at this stage of human evolution.’ To some it will seem sad that such an admirable scientist as Sir Hermann Bondi can endorse this shallow, polemical book with the following words: ‘Faith in an absolute unchanging truth is presented [in this book] not only as the arrogant nonsense it is, but also as the great evil and inhumanity … a large number of tepid believers who give strength and power to the fanatics and self-serving individuals who lead such a faith system …’ I speak as one of those ‘tepid believers’ and perhaps I feel that I am being both patronized and insulted. At least I am reassured by being in pretty good company. It would seem Sir Hermann Bondi’s term ‘tepid believers’ applies to the great majority of people in our sophisticated society. And perhaps we might reflect that the greatest scientists, when speaking away from the topic of their expertise, can make no special claims.
Wade Clark Roof, in his recent book Spiritual Marketplace: The Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion, points out that current surveys show that 94 per cent of Americans believe in God, 90 per cent report praying to God regularly and around 90 per cent claim some form of religious affiliation. On the surface, Britain would seem to be substantially different. In 1992, it was estimated that around 14.4 per cent of the adult population of these mostly Christian islands claimed active membership of a Christian Church, though there are considerable variations across the country – notably, Church membership is six times higher in Northern Ireland than in England. But while Church membership is declining, there is a substantial element, as Grace Davie points out in her book Religion in Britain, of believing but not belonging. People are now more individual in their religious beliefs and find, perhaps not entirely surprisingly and for reasons well beyond the scope of this book, that belonging to an established Church is no longer entirely relevant to their needs. But religious thinking is still strong and shows little sign of decline. Studies by the European Values Group show that more than 70 per cent of the British and European population believe in God, more than 50 per cent need moments of prayer, and 55 to 60 per cent define themselves as ‘a religious person’. Two thirds of Britons believe in the concept of ‘sin’ and the ‘soul’, and over 50 per cent in Heaven. At least one third of British and European adults professed to ‘often thinking about the meaning of life’. These figures do not show a decline in the last decade or so.
Here is clear evidence that, while religious affiliation may be changing in modern human society, belief in the spiritual continues and shows little decline. Given that we live in a society which is based on rational behaviour, where people are relatively well educated, where there is good communication, where we can see daily evidence of the scientific basis for so much of what we do, it may seem surprising at first that so many people still profess belief in God. Why has such a seemingly irrational belief survived intact?
One possible, indeed likely, solution is that religiosity and hence religion has given Homo sapiens an evolutionary advantage. There is also some evidence that religiosity – the ability to feel ‘spiritual’ – may be inherited. In one study, Dr Tom Bouchard from Minneapolis compared thirty-five sets of identical twins with thirty-seven non-identical twins. Each of the pairs of twins had been brought up from birth by different adopting parents. Identical twins reared apart showed much closer similarity in their religiousness than non-identical twins. If one identical twin was deeply religious, the other was likely to be as well, even if the adopting parents did not have any particular religious tendencies. What was interesting was that a twin brought up in one religion would tend to be as spiritual as its twin brought up in another, even if the parents were agnostic or atheist. So there may well be a genetic tendency towards religiosity, more pronounced in some people than in others, which has long been part of the human condition.
Dr David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in New York State is convinced that religion is an adaptation favoured by natural selection. In his recent book Darwin’s Cathedral, he argues that group selection, so criticized by the neo-Darwinists, was a driving force in promoting religious feelings during evolution. He suggests we should think of society as an organism, the old idea that preceded William Hamilton’s revolutionary views. If society is an organism, he asks, can we then think of morality and religion as biologically and culturally evolved adaptations that enable human groups to function as single units rather than as collections of individuals? Dr Wilson brings evidence from groups as diverse as hunter-gatherer societies and urban American congegrations. He suggests that religions have enabled people to achieve by collective action what they never could alone. Ultimately, he is one of those rather uncommon evolutionary biologists who is supportive of religion and religious values. This is a view which may be regarded as scientifically rather unorthodox, but one with which I have a strong sympathy.
One of the stronger arguments that atheists bring against the notion of the existence of God is that no two religions believe in precisely the same values and that each appears to be intolerant of others. If God exists, how can two people believe in opposing views of His or Her manifestation? It is certainly true that each religion has a different moral code, but there are some basic human values, it seems, which are close to being universal. Indeed, Wilson suggests that there is a set of basic human moral values which are seen in widely different societies and which he feels are the products of our evolution. He also argues that ‘religion must conform to morality’. Consequently, it seems that in his view morality is not God-given but something that has been arrived at.
A central tenet of the moral code of Western society would seem to be the idea of the sanctity of human life. Of course, the definition of what is life may vary from society to society, from culture to culture, but it is surely likely that there is a selective advantage in such a belief.
As a Jew, I feel that the greatest example of what is close to being a set of universal values is that found in the first five books of the Old Testament. Laid down here are principles which are centred on the sanctity of life. I do not refer only to the Ten Commandments and the divine instruction against murder; the whole structure of Mosaic law, adopted in various guises and in different forms by other Western religions, is centred on this idea. Though it is frequently misrepresented by some of those who would follow the line taken by Richard Dawkins, its ideals have never been transcended. The notion of all men’s equality, the clear recognition of the need for justice, the basic idea of individual liberty, the application of a Sabbath – a day of rest which applies to everybody in society, householders, servants, strangers – are essentially about the protection of life and the maintenance of its quality. Respect for life is even shown in this tradition by how domestic animals are afforded protection: rest on the Sabbath, no unnecessary cruelty, care and humanity given to them, even humane methods of slaughter – this is a way of ensuring lack of brutalization and respect for life.
The lowest point on Earth is one which supports the least life, and is to humans one of the most inhospitable. The arid beach around the Dead Sea in Israel, with its rocks made of pure potash and salt and its torrid, hot, sulphurous atmosphere, is 1,500 feet below sea level. In those concentrated, undrinkable, oily waters thick with all sorts of minerals, hardly any life is sustained beyond some single-celled green algae by the name of Dunaliella parva and primeval bacteria, the red, chlorine-loving Archaea. Whether it was always thus is hard to know, but on this site the Bible tells of the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and brimstone – God’s response to the persistent sinning of the people of that valley. Even now, long after that presumably volcanic catastrophe, there is clear evidence that human civilization survived just a few miles away, at least for many centuries. On the west side of the sea’s shore, rising well over a thousand feet sheer above this rift valley, are the cliffs of Masada. On this flat plateau there is a natural fortress which was once accessible only by a narrow, steep and dangerous ‘snake path’. This archaeological site was where one of King Herod’s palaces was built, and it subsequently became the scene of one of the most puzzling and paradoxical events in Roman and Jewish history.
The best account of what apparently happened at Masada is that written by Josephus Flavius in his The Jewish War.5 Josephus, a Jew from an elite priestly family, was the youthful governor of Galilee, and a rebel fighting against the Roman occupation. Eventually he was captured and he surrendered to Vespasian, who subsequently became emperor; Josephus survived captivity by becoming a Roman citizen, and later a successful historian. Josephus’s histories are replete with examples of humans causing their own deaths.
Josephus recounts how, some seventy-five years after Herod’s death, a group of Jewish religious zealots overcame the small Roman garrison of Masada, probably taking it by surprise at night. Until that moment, Masada had always been thought to be totally impregnable and resistant to siege. The narrow path up, the steepness of its cliffs and its many huge water cisterns, buried deep in the rock at the top and providing essential supplies for drinking and agriculture, meant that the inhabitants of Masada could sustain themselves in isolation for long periods. From this vantage point, which today still has a clear view over the whole rift valley and across to the mountains of Jordan, the rebels carried a two-year war to the might of the Roman army, descending from this base at night and harassing their enemy across the surrounding countryside. In the year 73, the Romans finally mustered a force to take effective action. Flavius Silva, commander of the Tenth Legion, surrounded Masada by building eight separate camps and slowly constructed a massive ramp up part of the western walls, possibly using thousands of Jewish slaves. One year later, a battering ram was moved into place, and it became only a matter of time before the defending zealots were defeated.
According to Josephus, some 960 men, women and children were in the fortress. Just two women survived to tell their tale to Josephus; the rest seemed to have decided that, rather than be taken alive, they would cast lots to see who would kill the children and then themselves commit suicide. Josephus records: ‘[the Romans could do no] other than wonder at the courage of their resolution and at the immovable contempt of death which so great a number of them had shown …’
Both Judaism and Christianity, like the main monotheistic religions, regard the sanctity of human life as a central pillar of their moral beliefs. Life is regarded as being given by God. If we are made in the image of God, then it is our duty to protect, maintain and enhance life wherever possible. And consequently Western civilization’s morality is based on this one premise. Our moral values stem from our conviction that life is uniquely sacred and the framework of our religious and secular law emanates from that principle. So, given that there is no real evidence that the Romans would have destroyed the entire commune of Masada upon their capture (certainly according to the evidence of the two survivors), we have a paradox. Whether one is a Jewish religious zealot and therefore presumably committed to the sanctity of life, or whether one believes that humans are ultimately most concerned with the genetic imperative of propagation of genes, this action of the besieged on Masada seems extraordinary.
Of course, each religion has its differences. This is always one of the arguments proposed by atheists against the idea of a unifying religious truth, and hence against the idea of there being a God. For Jews, interpretation of the sanctity of life is somewhat different from that in, say, the Christian tradition. According to the Jewish tradition, the actions of the inhabitants of Masada are unusual, because voluntary death was certainly something which was rarely condoned.
In the Old Testament, except perhaps for a vague allusion in the Book of Isaiah and a firmer reference in the Book of Daniel (a strange, apocalyptic book, late in Jewish biblical history),6 there is no idea of an after-life. Life emanates from God, who gave it, and death becomes an event of absolute finality. When Job is brought low, from riches to poverty, from health to disease, from having a large family to total bereavement, friendlessness and abject suffering, though he considers death, he never contemplates suicide. In the Jewish tradition, martyrdom starts to be regarded as a ‘positive’ action only around a hundred to two hundred years before Christ. In Maccabees II, Hanna and her seven sons are subjected to a gruesome death7 when they refuse to eat the pork forced on them by the king, Antiochus. All of them profess to a belief in life after death and a conviction that their torturers will suffer future judgement.
From such martyrdom to suicide (under extreme conditions) seems a short step. Rabbi Hanina ben Teradyon, whose martyrdom is remembered every year by Jews celebrating Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was executed at the time of the Emperor Hadrian. In the Talmud, tractate Avodah Zarah, it is told how the Romans burned him at the stake with a scroll of the Law wrapped around his body and wool around his heart so that his vital organs would burn slowly and his death would be protracted. As the fire begins to rage, his disciples call to him to ‘open your mouth so the fire may enter’ to end his suffering. Rabbi Hanina replies, ‘Let Him who gave me [life] take it away, for no-one should injure themselves.’ The Talmud continues:
The executioner said to him, ‘Rabbi, if I raise the flame and take away the wool from your heart, will you cause me to enter the World to come?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Then swear to me,’ and he swore. Then he [the executioner] raised the flame and took away the tufts of wool from his heart and his soul departed speedily. Then the executioner jumped and threw himself into the fire. And a bat-kol [heavenly voice] exclaimed, ‘Rabbi Hanina and the executioner have been assigned a place in the World to come.’ When Rabbi [Judah] heard it he wept, saying ‘One may attain eternal life in a single hour, another after many years.’
The message here seems to be that Hanina refuses to decide to take his own life, but he does allow someone else, the executioner, to act on his behalf. He brings about his own death only indirectly. Remarkably, the executioner receives approval from a heavenly authority when he achieves eternity by jumping into the flames he himself has created.8
The value of human life is central to Jewish thought. Under Jewish law, there were four categories of execution – stoning, strangulation, decapitation and asphyxiation9 – but the respect given to human life was so great that these penalties were hardly ever enacted after the Temple of Solomon had been constructed. The Sanhedrin that enacted a death penalty once in seventy years was called the ‘Murderous Sanhedrin’. So many conditions were required to be fulfilled by Jewish courts before judicial execution that it wasn’t until 1962 that a Jewish court actually recorded condemning a man to death. His name was Adolf Eichmann.
Christianity has an undoubtedly equal recognition of life’s sanctity; the interpretation is slightly different, but the basic concept is the same. Jesus himself was a martyr, in a sense a voluntary one. He had the opportunity on more than one occasion to avert his own execution, but ultimately he was crucified and achieved everlasting life. Perhaps partly in consequence, at least until the time of St Augustine, martyrdom continued through Christian history from its earliest days, and martyrs are still revered. A typical account is that of the Christians persecuted by Septimus Severus who in March AD 203 were led into the amphitheatre in Carthage to ‘fight’ with lions. They chose death rather than compromise their faith. Among them was Vibia Perpetua, just twenty-two years old, with her infant son. Before condemning her, the Roman governor, Hilarianus, implored, ‘Have pity on your father’s grey head … on your infant son.’ ‘Non facio,’ replied Perpetua. ‘Are you a Christian?’ said Hilarianus. ‘Christiana sum,’ she answered. And it seems that this for Perpetua, as so often before and so often since, was the ultimate religious act. ‘It is not with wild animals that I will fight, but with the Devil, but I know I will win victory,’ she is reported to have said. Victory for her was life after death.
Nor, in the Christian tradition, is suicide itself necessarily a matter of total condemnation. Matthew recounts his version of the death of Judas Iscariot thus: ‘When Judas, his betrayer, saw that he was condemned he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders saying, “I have sinned in betraying innocent blood.” They said, “What is that to us? That is your affair.” And throwing the pieces of silver down in the Temple he went and hanged himself.’ Here, Judas clearly repents, and nowhere does Matthew show disapproval for his action as a suicide. Judas takes his life even though he is not under threat, and this is seen simply as an act of remorse.
It is not until the later tradition, in the writings of St Augustine, that we find criticism of Judas and a strong objection to suicide as an immoral act. Augustine likened martyrs to criminals who had broken the law. He pointed out that death should be avoided, stressing that it was preferable to flee from persecution whenever possible. He also argued that it was wrong for non-Christians to kill themselves. The barbarian invasion of Rome in AD 410 can be cited as an example when non-Christian Roman women killed themselves rather than submit to rape, an act of self-destruction Augustine condemns.
Even in modern times we have condemned suicide. By 1800, many horrific medieval laws had been repealed in England, but attempted suicide was still a crime, its punishment, paradoxically, death. Nicholas Ogarev, writing a letter home to Russia circa 1860, described how a man in London who had cut his own throat was revived, tried by the court and then hanged – but his throat wounds broke down and he was able to breathe through the hole in his trachea. After being cut down by the good alderman, they suffocated him. After 1900, attempted suicide in England was punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment, and it was only in 1961 that Parliament declared suicide no longer a crime – though, as we have seen recently with cases of voluntary euthanasia, abetting a suicide is still a crime carrying a penalty of up to fourteen years in jail.
One of the most unspeakable accounts of man’s absolute depravity, of the most base, perverted and evil instincts, was movingly told by Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist from Vienna who survived both in body and spirit from the depths of Auschwitz. My very imperfect prose does injustice to the reality he experienced.
He was one of 1,500 ‘ordinary’ people who on one particular train, in the depths of winter, travelled for four days and nights, eighty to each truck, with no room to lie down. All but three hundred of the people on his train were incinerated on the first day of their arrival, arbitrarily chosen by the leisurely movement of an SS officer’s finger gently pointing to the left rather than to the right in front of the column of new arrivals. Together with other men, Frankl was stripped naked and all his clothes and possessions removed. He was deloused, his whole body was shaved of all hair, and he was repeatedly beaten.
In the first four days after his arrival, Frankl had just five ounces of bread to eat. He slept in a bunk shared by nine other men, some of them already afflicted with copious diarrhoea, covered by two filthy blankets, his only pillow his soiled and clay-covered shoes. The shirt he was given had to last for six months, he was able to wash only once in many days, and wherever he walked was filth and human ordure. Violent, death-threatening thrashings by the guards for no reason at all were constant, frostbite with loss of toes and swelling of the feet frequent, contact with the corpses of his comrades a regular event, infection and diarrhoea inevitable – but to stop work in the forest where temperatures were often thirty degrees below freezing meant certain execution. Frankl describes how, after the initial reaction of absolute shock, slowly another mood took its place – apathy. After a while, everybody slipped into this blunted and dehumanized state until they became mere ‘primitives’. Viktor Frankl describes how one morning ‘I heard someone, whom I knew to be brave and dignified, cry like a child because he finally had to go to the snowy marching grounds in his bare feet, as his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear. In those ghastly minutes, I found a bit of comfort: a small piece of bread which I drew out of my pocket and munched with absorbed delight.’
One by one, nearly all Frankl’s comrades died of starvation or diseases such as typhus. Their bodies were thrown on carts, and he, among others, was forced to dump the corpses into pits. Others were sent to the chambers. No value was placed on these deaths by any of the guards, and he and his fellow remaining prisoners could no longer feel pity. His own feelings, as he looked about him, he summed up ironically in a quotation from Nietzsche: ‘Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker’ (‘That which does not kill me makes me stronger’).
What is truly remarkable about Dr Frankl’s account – he was one of the very few who survived – is this. He is clear that, after the shock and then the apathy, eventually in spite of the primitive and deprived existence in the camp it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. He says that some were able ‘to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom’. Only in this way, he says, can one explain the paradox that some prisoners who were not physically robust in themselves survived. He found that, in common with others in the same predicament, he suddenly had a heightened awareness of the beauty of nature. He recounts how one evening when they were lying exhausted on the floor of their hut, the first miserable food of the day in their hands, he and his colleagues saw a fellow prisoner rush in to persuade them to leave the hut to admire an extraordinary sunset. Dr Frankl is convinced that spiritual feelings not only enabled him to survive, but all those who walked out of that camp. Hope became a most important emotion for them all.
‘They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said [to them] that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours – a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, a God – and he would not expect us to disappoint him.’
Perhaps, indeed, as François Voltaire famously wrote in the eighteenth century, ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.’ Maybe, with the growth of our huge brain and with the nature of our consciousness, man could not after all stand naked and defenceless on the savannah. Possibly, later in time, with the development of language and the use of symbols, man grew an instinct for spirituality which pushed him to recognize and bury his dead and to believe in a force which shaped his life, and led him to appreciate the preciousness of life in other humans.
Of course, I do not in any way deny evolution, but science does not explain everything, and to pretend that it does seems to me arrogant. Perhaps at some time our beginnings were initiated by a divine force. One thing that is clear to me is that a knowledge of instinct and a view of evolution alone by no means explain our existence, or the way we are. I may well be a poor scientist, but for me, personally, the universe is a most remarkable and beautiful design, one of physical rationality and populated with human creatures possessing insight and a divine intelligence. And for all I know, one of the most remarkable things about our special universe is that it is unique. Of course, it may be that in time the ideas behind quantum cosmology and new universes elsewhere show us that this is not so.
The great Jewish philosopher Moses ben Maimon – Maimonides – who lived from 1135 to 1204, struggled with the notion of creation. The most serious contradiction he faced was that the Bible traditionally teaches that the universe is the result of a pure act of divine creation – creation ‘out of nothing’. But Aristotle, who for Maimonides was the most convincing natural scientist, had taught that the universe is eternal, without beginning and without end. Maimonides concluded that had Aristotle clearly proved his theory of the eternity of the universe, one would have to reinterpret the Bible accordingly. Effectively, Maimonides was suggesting that until a better explanation became available the biblical account was the one he intended to follow. Maimonides accepted the authority of biblical tradition in matters of law, but where science was concerned, as a religious rationalist, there were no authorities. What is most rationally convincing here and now, however much it may go against traditionally accepted opinions, is the way we must try to use our God-given intelligence to understand the natural world.
But how can a God exist when there is palpably so much evil in the world? I believe that in spite of our powerful instincts – instincts that, as we have seen throughout this book, influence virtually every aspect of our behaviour – we have, above all, an understanding of good and bad. Central to this belief is the notion of man’s free will. Man has the ability and the freedom to choose between what is moral and what is immoral. Yes, I understand that there are rare circumstances – people with a genetic problem such as partial duplication of chromosome 15; people brought up in a grossly deprived environment such as those feral children – where our will cannot be said to be truly free, but for most of us there is basic morality which just possibly is God-given and which is shaped by those aspects of human nature which are divine. How could God exist when there is palpably so much evil in the world? Well, how could it be otherwise? If there truly is free will, the one most powerful explanation of God is that He does not interfere – indeed, cannot interfere. His interference would effectively negate the freedom humans enjoy to do both great good and great harm to one another. Having set our universe in motion, He has to leave it to man to decide how to handle his existence if man is truly free to choose.
So religion does have a purpose. I know that I personally would be far less responsible, far less moral, far less likely to seek the right path were I not to have a set of rules. Often these rules may seem illogical or tedious, but they serve the purpose of discipline, which is necessary for all humans. To be useful and good, religion must conform to morality, a morality I personally consider likely to be divine but which changes as man grows and understands the natural world around him. That morality is critical, because together with religion it gives us a framework to control those emotions that have arisen from the primitive beginnings of life, feelings which are unlearned and inherited – our instincts.
1 Many years ago, I was having a heavy safe installed by two very burly workmen from Chubb, Ted and Bert. It had to be manhandled two storeys up the fire escape to my office close to the hospital wall, overlooked by the high-security wing of Wormwood Scrubs prison. To make conversation, I said, ‘I don’t know why I am bothering with a safe really – no-one knows there is any cash here anyway.’ Bert just raised an eyebrow, grunted, and cast a glance over his right shoulder.
2 As I write, I sit in a casino hotel in Las Vegas. Here, people seem to be very self-absorbed, less concerned about others than anywhere else on my travels through the USA. I wonder what percentage of the money would be regarded as worth it here?
3 Of course we get job satisfaction out of doing work which helps other people, but we get job satisfaction in all sorts of ways which don’t exclude purely altruistic motives at least a portion of the time.
4 The Stone can now be viewed in the Louvre, in Paris.
5 The story of Masada attracted many explorers to the Judaean desert, but it wasn’t until 1842 that the site was unequivocally identified. Excavations took place only as recently as 1963 using, among others, many volunteer English students, among whom were a number of my university friends.
6 Daniel is possibly the last book to be written in the Hebrew Bible and depicts the sixth century BC captivity of the Jews under Babylon and Persia.
7 Scalping, then amputation of the hands and feet, and removal of the tongues, which were fried in a large metal pan.
8 A similar story is told in Talmud tractate Gittin, concerning Rabbi Gamaliel’s arrest by a Roman soldier, who achieves eternal life by throwing himself off a roof.
9 As fully recounted in Genesis Rabbah 65.22, Jakum of Zerototh decides he is so unworthy as to deserve death by all four categories of execution. His ingenuity allowed him to manage this tour de force, and with a fitting end he enters Paradise.