SOME POEMS ARE LIKE OLD FRIENDS. COMPANIONS through the years, they keep us fascinated even when we don’t entirely understand them. That’s what the following lines were like for me:
On my wall hangs a Japanese woodcut
Mask of an evil demon, lacquered in gold
With empathy I see
The swollen veins on its brow, suggesting
How stressful it is to be angry.
I was seventeen when I read Bertolt Brecht’s “The Mask of Evil” for the first time. Like so many young adults, I was angry at the world and longed for a better one. Of course I understood the poem’s literal meaning; from my own experience I well knew the strength required to quarrel and the energy wasted in being angry! Worse than the unpleasant feeling itself is that it separates you from other people. Fury is a prison. Each object of our anger is one less person we can join forces with.
But Brecht’s word for “angry,” böse, designates more than just a feeling. It’s a moral judgment as well, for it also means “evil.” This is almost certainly what Brecht had in mind when he entitled his poem Die Maske des Bösen. He wrote it in 1942, when the Nazis’ conquest of Europe was at its height and Hitler’s troops were spreading terror from Norway to North Africa, from the Crimea to the Atlantic. But the angry young man I was when I first encountered his poem found this reading of the poem extremely irritating. How was it possible that people who exploited, injured, and killed others for their own profit could suffer from that behavior? Do Himmler and Hitler in the end deserve our pity?
Much later I understood that you could turn this idea around. If we remain free of malice and show ourselves to be fair and generous, it’s possible that we do so not just out of fear of punishment or because it’s been hammered into us by our upbringing. Humaneness in our dealings with others could perhaps also benefit us by raising our own sense of well-being. The ancient question of whether to worry about the happiness of others or only about your own would then automatically be answered: Both should concern you, because one can’t exist without the other.
That thought was the germ of the present book. It sets out to contradict all the admonitions to proper behavior as well as the centuries-old philosophical principles that tell us we must resist our sweet, egocentric inclinations because that is what the bitter pill of moral duty requires. If our own well-being is so closely bound up with that of others, that would explain why so many people who chase after their own private happiness fail to find it: Perhaps these seekers of happiness have chosen the wrong goals.
More than twenty-five hundred years ago, Aristotle was already postulating that a happy life kept the welfare of others in view. But the philosopher had no way to prove his speculation, which is another reason why the idea took hold that moral action can only occur at the price of self-denial. But today we have empirical research that confirms Aristotle’s conjecture. Humans who act for the benefit of others are as a rule more content and often more healthy and successful than contemporaries who think only of their own welfare. “One thing I know,” Albert Schweitzer once confessed, “the only ones among you who will be truly happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.”1 In that spirit, this book is a continuation of my earlier work The Science of Happiness.2
Do altruists really get through life better? Everyday common sense rebels against the notion. If you give something away, you have less for yourself, while people who use their strength or spend money to achieve their own goals have an advantage—at first glance, anyway. A look at the natural world seems to urge us to hold on to what we have, for all animals, including humans, are competing for scarce resources. Those who have, survive; those who don’t, perish.
But I intend to show that everyday common sense is mistaken. Our life together follows much more complicated rules than the law of the jungle. The following pages will explain some of the principles that actually govern our success or failure. A central discovery is that egocentrics do better only in the short term, but in the long run, it is mostly people who act for the welfare of others who get ahead. Of course “mostly” doesn’t mean “always,” and we will need to discuss when the one strategy or the other is called for.
If people who help others are more successful, evolution ought to favor such behavior. And this introduces a fascinating hypothesis: Might it be innate for us to care for others? Is there a gene for altruism?
The fact that the world is teeming with egocentrics is not an argument against the possibility of such a gene. Because of course, people are not programmed solely as selfless beings. It’s even possible that our predisposition to look first to our own advantage is strongest. That would explain why mere exhortations and resolutions to be a better person are so ineffective. But the question is not whether a certain measure of egocentrism is unavoidably part of being human. Instead, it’s a question of whether we possess other and less well-known innate impulses.
Humans are more conflicted in their motives than any other creature. What’s more, we possess the unique freedom to act against our instincts. The spectrum of applications for our innate talents is enormous. For example, evolution constructed us as runners; that’s why every healthy person is capable of running a marathon after the necessary training. But many of us use our cars even for the shortest errands and allow our leg muscles to atrophy. In the same way, we can cultivate or neglect our predisposition to altruism.
Nature, however, has a clever way to get us to do what she wants—she seduces us with good feeling. Sex is exciting and pleasurable because it serves reproduction. Our sensations of pleasure while eating, which are more effective than many would wish, aim to store up a layer of fat against lean times. In a very similar way, nature rewards us for fairness and helpfulness; it feels good to be generous. Brain research in fact shows that altruism activates the same synapses as eating a chocolate bar or having sex.
One is tempted to paraphrase Brecht: “How sad it is to be egocentric”—sad and dangerous as well. Not dangerous for one’s fellow humans, since at least in developed societies, unbridled egocentrism is kept in check by laws and courts. But who is going to protect the egocentrics from themselves? Serious depression is on a frighteningly rapid rise in most countries, including Germany, where I live. Within a single year, the risk of young people becoming clinically depressed has more than tripled. And according to the World Health Organization, in another ten years, depression will be the most prevalent disease among women and second only to cardiovascular diseases among men. Many experts explain these frightening statistics by pointing to the dissolution of the traditional bonds among families, friends, and colleagues, which results in societies in which only the individual counts. What is certain is that a commitment to others can prevent morbid melancholy.3
Then what keeps us from caring more for others, if only for our own good? Whoever tries it soon realizes how often we second-guess our own wish to be generous. Although we may frequently feel an impulse to do something for others, we often suppress it. For altruism almost always seems riskier than acting exclusively for our own advantage.
For one thing, there is the fear of making ourselves look ridiculous. Generosity has a strange reputation in our society. We praise selfless human beings in public but remain cynical in private. We reserve our admiration for those who seem cool and strong-willed. Empathy, on the other hand, is considered a sign of weakness. The good judgment of those who occasionally put their own interests second is called into question; all too often one hears the word “do-gooder.”
And so we are hopelessly ambivalent in the matter of selflessness. We want to believe in it but can’t, and even if we could, we wouldn’t admit it. But one thought seems not to occur to anyone—that someone’s willing commitment to others could be a sign of strength.
Even deeper than the fear of derision is the completely rational fear of being exploited. For as long as people strive for their own advantage, some will take advantage of the goodwill of others. That has been the tragedy of every revolution begun by idealists.
And so this book will speak of giving and taking, of trust and betrayal, empathy and ruthlessness, love and hate. But the question will not be whether humans are good or bad. The greatest philosophers have already puzzled long and hard about that. What they have written sometimes sounds like a discussion about whether motion pictures as a whole are entertaining or disturbing—it depends, of course, on what movie you see. Nor will this book be about how we should behave. There are already plenty of convincing systems of moral philosophy, and the only question is why we so seldom follow them.
What I will try to explain instead is under what conditions humans are fair and generous—and when they are unscrupulous and egocentric. We must differentiate three questions. First, how is unselfishness possible at all? Second, what moves us to do things for others? And finally, why are some people so much more helpful than others?
The first section of this book will focus on the most clear-cut but by no means simplest form of living together: you and I. Our propensity to share will be explored, but also our propensity to cheat. For although cooperative action pays off, so does cheating, at least in the short term. But if the generous person who attributes good motives to others and is forgiving usually does better in the long run, how do we decide when we should be trusting and when it would be better to hold back? The demands such a decision places on our reason can be too great to sort out. The empathic system often comes to reason’s assistance, for it functions quite differently from the usual strategic thinking. Whenever we encounter others in joy or pain, we mirror their feelings in our own head. As if the border between “you” and “me” were dissolved, the two brains then resonate together. Similar mechanisms assure that trust and mutual understanding occur.
The empathic system has an extraordinary number of facets. Contrary to what is often asserted, empathy alone makes us neither generous nor ready to help. Active help for others requires that we can feel what moves another person. And finally, neuroscientists have recently succeeded in providing impressive visual images of how friendship and love originate in our heads.
The focus of the second part of the book will be the community, beginning with a journey into the distant past: How did our ancestors learn to share with one another? This is still one of the greatest puzzles of evolutionary theory. Often enough, humans have been criticized as the cruelest of all creatures. But in fact, we are uniquely magnanimous. The most recent research shows that no other animal voluntarily hands over anything to another member of its species except for giving food to its own children. But all over the world, humans see to their nourishment collectively, and even little girls and boys spontaneously give presents to each other. There is much evidence that our ancestors first had to become the friendliest apes before they got the chance to become the smartest apes as well. We owe our intelligence to our willingness to give.
But we don’t give indiscriminately. One of the strongest and most vitally important of all our needs is our desire for fairness. A community that does not ensure fairness among its members will fail sooner or later. Justice makes altruism possible, but the hunger for justice also brings with it envy and the desire for revenge. And these are not even the darkest aspects of selflessness; every group sticks together best when it is in competition with other groups. That’s why exclusion and hatred of “the others” are the dark sisters of altruism. Thus humans owe their propensities to take care of others not only to their most noble but also to some of their ugliest characteristics. In this regard, modern research confirms a relationship portrayed in the myths of all ages, from the fallen angel Lucifer to Darth Vader: the figure of light transformed into a dark tyrant.
Can we live out altruism’s good sides while avoiding the bad? The future of humankind depends largely on the answer to that question. As long as corporations, peoples, and nations pursue their own interests at the expense of the welfare of all, it will hardly be possible to protect the bases for life on our planet.
The history of humankind began with an altruistic revolution—our ancestors started to care for their fellows. Only together did they stand a chance in a world where food was growing scarce because of climate change. Today we find ourselves at a similar threshold: The challenge is to learn cooperation on a much larger scale. It is time for a second altruistic revolution.
There is good reason to be optimistic. Through digital networks, easy travel, and global trade, far-flung regions of the world are drawing closer together and cultures are merging at a breathtaking pace. In this book, I would like to show how this network of connections also shifts the things that drive our behavior. It costs us less and less to be selfless, while egocentrism grows more and more risky.
The future belongs to the altruists. We are born with the predispositions necessary to maintain ourselves in the world. But while we are familiar with the rationally justified pursuit of our own advantage, we are still uncertain about the impulses that lead us to seek our own happiness in the happiness of others. This book is an invitation to explore the friendly side of ourselves.