Let's kick off the new year with an upbeat thought from psychologist Dacher Ketner: "We are built to be kind"

"We are built to be kind": A question that has intrigued UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner is why people, who we know to be motivated by self-interst to perpetuate the species, are "so frequently and routinely good, and generous, and sacrificing?" And he insists that nobody understood this better than Charles Darwin, who believed that "communities that have the most sympathetic members will flourish and raise the greatest number of offspring."

by Ken

Hat tip to The Frisky's Rebecca Vipond Brink ("Here's Why Humans Are Built to Be Kind") for sharing this upbeat lesson from Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, whose work at the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab has led him to the belief that "we have to redefine human self-interest."

Yeah, 60 percent of what we do is really about maximizing an individual's personal gratification and desire. It's the classic survival of the most competitive. But 40 percent of the time we're really doing things for other people, and we sacrifice, and we risk exploitation, and we still do it. It actually becomes personally fulfilling and inspiring, to engage in that work. We find this secondary delight in acting on behalf of others.

Neuroscientists at UCLA, he says, have learned --

that if you feel physical pain, a part of your brain lights up, and if I see you have that physical pain, the same part of my brain lights up. It's as if we're wired to have the same experience of other people.

The Berkeley researchers, Professor Keltner tells us, have studied the "enormously complicated process" of empathy. "What we found in the brain is that a very old part of the brain, called the periaqueductal grey, which is common to mammals when they take care of things, lights up when you feel compassion." They've also found a major "class deficit in empathy and generosity" among upper-class people, who tend to lack the "enormous strength in these poorer communities of generosity, of empathy."

"The great ethical traditions," Keltner says, "have always been encouraging this" concern for others, "and now we're seeing the science say yeah, the brain really cares about other people."

TAKING THE "DARWIN" OUT OF SOCIAL DARWINISM

Which becomes especially interesting if we go back to the common model of "Social Darwinism," the supposedly-derived-from-Darwin social view that "generally," as Wikipedia puts it, "the strong should see their wealth and power increase while the weak should see their wealth and power decrease."

And this seems to me to land us smack in the middle of the important work that George Lakoff has done working from a sharp competition in our society between moral visions that he relates to sharply contrasted family models: a "strict father" one vs. a "nurturant parent" one (gender neutrality in the latter emphatically intended). In the splendid new, improved version of his basic book Don't Think of an Elephant!, George provides his best-yet rendering of the "strict father" model, which begins (on page 4, and let me stress that what I'm quoting here is just the beginning):

The strict father model begins with a set of assumptions: The world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. The world is also difficult because it is competitive. There will always be winners and losers. There is an absolute right and an absolute wrong. Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right. Therefore, they have to be made good.

What is needed in this kind of a world is a strong, strict father who can:

• protect the family in the dangerous world,
• support the family in the difficult world, and
• teach his children right from wrong.

What is required of the child is obedience, because the strict father is a moral authority who knows right from wrong. It is further assumed that the only way to teach kids obedience -- that is, right from wrong -- is through punishment, painful punishment, when they do wrong.

I don't think there's any disagreement that the world is a dangerous and difficult place, and each organism in it is struggling for survival, but it seems that Darwin never argued that the self-interest required for survival excludes strong concern for and action on behalf of others, and there is something crucially deficient in the conservative understanding of human self-interest, what we here at DWT think os as the old Greed and Selfishness model, which Professor Lakoff summarizes like so (page 6):

If everyone pursues her self-interest, then by [Adam Smith's] invisible hand, by nature, the self-interest of all will be maximized. That is, it is moral to pursue your self-interest, and there is a name for those people who do not do it. The name is do-gooder. A do-gooder is someone who is trying to help someone else rather than herself and is getting in the way of those who are pursuing their self-interest. Do-gooders screw up the system.

Professor Lakoff himself argues elsewhere that he considers the "strict father"-derived morality immoral. Now, while I hate to put words into Professor Keltner's mouth, it does seem as if he's telling us advances in our knowledge of the way the brain works are showing that there really is something wrong in the brains of the "strict father" adherents, whose thoughts and behavior are compromised by a fundamental neurological defect.

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