It has taken me some time to make my way back here; to find the words to so rightly express my discontents. When I was last here, Trump had just been elected the 47th President of the United States, and I wrote of my fears for the future in an article titled Lessons in Authoritarianism. I knew there were hard times to come and hard lessons to be learned, for Americans and the world over, but I never expected things to get this bad so quickly. (Such is the power of authoritarian motives, when the conditions are right.)
There’s a lot we could get into; so much to talk about that I have a hard time knowing what to write. Feelings of despair mixed with disappointment and disgust, and a looming cloud of fear over all the terrible things to come, and all that will be lost.
Among them, the loss of kindness is perhaps the most distressing, and along with it, decency, compassion, and the like—everything that once made us who we are.
Our values have clearly shifted, our ideals now less reliable than they were before. There was once a time when heroes fought for underdogs and the courageous were caring and kind, when strength was defined not by cruelty and hubris but an inclination to protect the weak and vulnerable. Many among us now idolize men and women who kick others when they’re already down, or degrade the lives of those less fortunate, just to boost their egos. Others turn a blind eye to greed and deceit as bullies become presidents and presidents become dictators. Power is derived no longer from temperance or charity, as the knights of old would have prescribed, but from anger, thievery, and pompous displays of superiority. All the while reason and intellect are the targets of mockery and disdain, as if they are the weaknesses within. Propped up now are those who lack decency, and celebrated are the cruel and the clownish.
For those of us who maintain a morsel of kindness or an ounce of decency, it’s a challenging time to be alive—as if everything good is being sucked out of the world and the only people who can stop it are the ones cheering it on.
But kindness will endure, I believe, because it has to.
It may come as a surprise (or a profound disappointment) to anyone who subscribes to a so-called “Darwinian” view of human society, which emphasizes competitiveness and self-interest as means to success (a view that was instilled in Trump by his father, and one that is consistent with the hyper-individualism infecting Western culture), but Darwin did not paint human nature in such cutthroat terms. His view of human nature was contrary to one in which the strongest or most competitive individuals were always the most successful. As esteemed psychologist Paul Ekman and others have pointed out, Darwin described human nature in far more communal terms, focusing on such capacities as empathy, altruism, and compassion as means to success. In his seminal work The Descent of Man, he argued that the human species had in fact succeeded because of traits like sharing and compassion—what he called sympathy. According to Darwin, “communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
Consistent with Darwin’s designation of Homo sapiens as a “social animal,” we, like our hominid predecessors and their predecessors before them, have always lived in groups. Though some may insist on exaggerating the importance of agentic motives of dominance and competition, research by American psychologist Michael Tomasello supports the view that our cooperative instincts are far more exemplary of who we are as a species. As our ancestors moved out of the jungle and onto the open plains of Africa two million years ago, they were forced to abandon the largely independent activity of picking fruit to attain food, and instead began foraging and scavenging—activities that relied heavily on cooperation and sharing. In order to be successful, these proto-humans learned to coordinate their efforts, work together more effectively as a group, and even share their bounties, however scarce. The act of sharing increased the likelihood that when necessary, others would share their bounty in return. Cooperation and kindness were therefore enhanced by necessity, and this way of life defined human societies for tens of thousands of years as we see ample evidence of early hunter-gatherers forming egalitarian societies unhampered by dominance hierarchies. In fact, for most of human history, members of any given society were far more equal in their relative standing than we see today, with leadership and decision-making decentralized and the group more cooperative overall.
Despite what individual differences may exist (and with the exception of those inclined towards psychopathy and other antisocial traits, who reflect a very small minority of the population), we are all inclined to cooperate. Environmental conditions of the past contributed to a cooperative disposition that is deeply engrained in human beings—in both our biological and psychological systems. It is for this reason that in discussions of universal human traits, cooperation, altruism, and other prosocial tendencies are cited first by evolutionary psychologists, not second. These are the traits that most reliably define human nature, not our need for control or dominance, nor our internal sense of individuality. Importantly, these prosocial adaptations—cooperation, kindness, and the like—arose early in our evolution. Our ancestors had already developed a cooperative inclination that far outweighed any competitive one before they left Africa. As Tomasello points out, worrying only about oneself in this evolutionary context would have left one shunned, excluded, and without food and resources that were attainable only by means of group membership. Simply put, cooperation—not competition—meant survival to our ancestors.
Oscar Yyarba, social psychologist and expert in group dynamics, has come to a similar conclusion. As he and his colleagues explain, “People in group life, across time and culture, have needed to fulfill two broad motives: to navigate and leverage social interactions and to pursue personal goals and distinctiveness, and in that order.” Of importance is the recognition of the primacy of prosocial traits like kindness and cooperation, as well as their precursory nature, for without a group to belong to, self-invested goals like power and competition could not be pursued.
Throughout the psychological literature we see ample evidence that group life supersedes individuality. Altruism and helping behaviour have been found to emerge very early in human development—so early that they must be the result of innate capacities rather than learning or reinforcement. Across multiple studies, infants have been found to spontaneously assist strangers with simple tasks, such as helping them find items in a room or opening cupboards when their hands are full. This helping behaviour appears to emerge early in life (around fourteen to eighteen months), before most parents begin expecting prosocial behaviour from their children. Moreover, parental rewards and encouragement do not increase the likelihood that infants will engage in helping behaviour in future experiments. In fact, they will often abandon more enjoyable and rewarding activities in order to help strangers. Adjacent research has found that we process prosocial traits like warmth and morality more quickly than individual motives like power and competence, such that our brains appear more attuned to communal information. Today we live alongside numerous other species with similarly communal origins and inclinations. From wolves to elephants, from flocks of birds to schools of fish, many of Earth’s creatures rely on the communal instinct for survival, such that the notion of individuality as it occurs in human societies is impractical if not dysfunctional.
Yet it feels as if our kindness and decency are slipping away, under attack by those whose self-interests exceed the bounds of nature. But all is not lost, because it can’t be. Authoritarianism may be on the rise and the bullies among us may be having their day, but we’re communal creatures at heart, connected in more ways than we know; reliant on one another in more ways than we care to notice. We survive on kindness and decency; depend on empathy and cooperation in all that we do. The truth is, no society can function as a collection of self-interested and isolated individuals (not for long, anyway). The infighting we see among those closest to Trump is proof of this claim, as is the finding that those whose power goes unchecked are worse off in almost all ways.
Kindness has to endure because without it we won’t survive. (We weren’t built to be individuals acting for ourselves and ourselves alone.) This doesn’t mean that we can be complacent; to the contrary, we will have to fight for the future we want, and we will have to fight hard. But we should nevertheless derive faith and hope from our eternal nature as Homo sapiens—from the enduring qualities of kindness, decency, and the like, which have served not to hold us back but in fact make us the resilient ape that we are. And though I may fear what lies ahead, I remain hopeful that we will come out of this better than we were before: united, cooperative, and decent again.
So let us work together, all of us, for the sake of a better world (for the sake of all life). Let us be kind to one another again, and decent. And let us save the future, together.
References:
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Brambilla, M., & Leach, C. W. (2014). On the importance of being moral: The distinctive role of morality in social judgment. Social Cognition, 32(4), 397–408.
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Chan, T., Wang, I., & Ybarra, O. (2019). Connect and strive to survive and thrive: The evolutionary meaning of communion and agency. In A.E. Abele & B. Wojciszke (Eds.), Agency and communion in social psychology (pp. 13–24). Routledge.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. John Murray.
Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and Selection in relation to sex, Vol. 1. John Murray.
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Tomasello, M., & Dweck, C. S., Silk, J. B., Skyrms, B., & Spelke, E. S. (Collaborators). (2009). Why we cooperate. MIT Press.
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Ybarra, O., Chan, E., & Park, D. (2001). Young and old adults’ concerns about morality and competence. Motivation and Emotion, 25, 85–100.