I am a primatologist who spends twelve hours most days in the company of a thirteen year old chimpanzee named Bow. I am also an editor with Inverted-A Press.
Yesterday, at dinner time, Somebody was very sad. It was not me. It was not Bow. But it was Somebody who had tears streaming down her face. And Bow, who usually starts his dinner conversation with "Give me X", spelled instead סליחה.
Now, you probably want to know what that means. But at this point, I am having trouble deciding how to translate this one Hebrew word. The word itself means "pardon" or "forgiveness", but Bow usually uses it to apologize, and then I always translate it as "I'm sorry."
English "I'm sorry" implies regret, and hence it can be used for both an apology and as an expression of sympathy over another person's pain and suffering. The Hebrew apology is a straightforward request for forgiveness.
I believe the Hebrew standard apology is better, because it accepts culpability, whereas the English one kind of blurs the line, and we can never tell if someone is saying "I'm sorry you got hurt, and I'm sorry I am the one who hurt you" -- or "I'm sorry you got hurt, but it's not my fault."
However, Bow has a very dim sense of culpability, so lots of times his apologies, both verbal and non-verbal, seem to be more about "I'm sorry you are angry. Please stop being angry."
Either way, though Bow's sense of right and wrong does not coincide with mine, he does feel empathy, and that was what he was trying to express with his limited vocabulary. Bow did not have anything to do with the sadness he saw. He did not cause it. But he wanted to express sympathy, and the easiest way was to use his apology word.
After that, he did order a dish of food, but when he sat down to wait for me to give him the food, Bow gestured through the glass to the Sad Person and it was his chimpanzee apology gesture! Of course, it was hard to do through the glass, but he offered up his knuckles to be kissed or bitten through the glass.
He really was trying to say "I'm sorry", but it wasn't an apology at all. The gesture had been grammaticalized to mean "I feel your sorrow!"
Even She smiled a little through her tears when She noticed it. "Is he sad that I'm sad?" -- "Yes."
Does Bow have empathy for others? Definitely. Does he have self-awareness? Yes.
But do I think he needs legal personhood rights? No. Because that's a political question. For more on that, read my post today in the other blog about the Immutable Soul.
This is an old picture of Bow when sad. I didn't get a photo of what happened yesterday.
Yesterday was my day off. I ran some errands, and I heard about a potential setback. I stopped to talk with Lawrence and told him about my frustrations about a certain business transaction, and then I went out to run more errands. Lawrence told me at the end of the day that after I left, Bow was really upset about the conversation he overheard about the business problem. He just would not go back to playing for a long time, and Lawrence had trouble distracting him.
Finally, Bow took Lawrence's hand and spelled: "Mommy is hurt."
Lawrence told him: "Momma is not hurt. Momma is mad!" After which, Bow calmed down and went back to his usual preoccupations: food, grooming, going outside.
Yes, I get angry sometimes. And yes, Bow would rather see me angry than hurt. If I'm angry then there is still a fighting chance. If I am hurt, it means we have suffered a loss. If I lose, Bow loses.
I know a lot of people who are trying to control their expressions every moment of the day, to convince themselves and others that they only ever have positive feelings: happiness, joy, sympathy, fellowship, friendship. They try to avoid anger, fear, sadness and boredom. They don't actually avoid having those feelings. They just disguise them -- sometimes even from themselves.
Bow, showing affection
Chimpanzees are very good at picking up on other people's feelings. It's one of the things that distinguishes them from us. They see right past any attempts to disguise who you really are and what you really feel.
Does Bow have empathy for me? Sure. But it's got to do with the fact that we are on the same team. If something bad happens to me, then that means that his interests are jeopardized, too. And even though he does not understand the exact nature of every business transaction, he has a very clear gut feeling about when something is "for us" or "against us."
Believe it or not, that's actually what empathy is for. It's not so we'll stop to help our enemies when they are wounded on the field of battle or so that we will adopt that baby from the tribe that is making war on us, or so that we will give something we need away to a stranger because he needs it more. Sometimes empathy does work that way, but that's not how it evolved and that is not its main function. It evolved to help us figure out what is in our own best interest, even when we are not the one directly hurt or threatened.
There's been an article about the benefits of reading that has been going the rounds, and many pro-literacy advocates are touting it as very significant: it claims that people who read a lot are better at understanding other people's feelings. It claims that reading develops empathy. And the more literary the book, the greater the empathy.
I think that is patently false. All my life, I have observed that people with their nose in a book most of the day are less alert to the feelings of others, which may be why they get bullied so often. The ability to read others in my experience is inversely proportional to the amount of reading we have done. People who read literary fiction are more likely to be so out of touch with their own feelings that they don't even know when they themselves are angry, much less somebody else. And yes, there was a political bias in the article, because it mentioned that people who read literary fiction are the most sympathetic to the downtrodden and excluded groups. In other words, there was an implication that empathy is a tool to achieve a particular political result.
Perspective shifting is an important mental exercise. Our ability to shift perspective grows as we become more intelligent, more capable of abstraction and less immediately engaged by direct experience, and it is better developed in science fiction than in mainstream literature. In order to really shift perspective, though, you need to be able to momentarily disengage your feelings. But even though you shift your perspective to identify with an alien race or a different culture, at the end of the day, your actual empathy is reserved for the people on your team. Just like Bow's.
Japanese Beetles attacking my peach trees
Sometimes it's not even about right or wrong or good or bad. It's just about them or us. Take those Japanese beetles that I have seen around lately. One can identify with their desire to find a mate and be fruitful and multiply. But when they are attacking my peach trees in their multitudes, my empathy lessens. I am determined to thwart their very understandable and natural desires.
The greatest discord in this world does not come from a lack of mutual understanding. Its source is conflict of interest. If anybody is trying to convince you otherwise, he probably has something he hopes to gain. Take care!
Bow and I have been listening to FL Light's English translation of theIliad.
This is rather difficult English, and Bow is not finding it all that interesting, despite all the action scenes.
It's strange how a literary work can be full of violence, yet lull a chimpanzee to sleep. If I showed him a movie enacting this, he would have his hair standing on end and would feel forced to display his prowess. But when the word for killing someone is "disanimate", the shear opacity of the vocabulary can make war seem very tame.
They say that there is now "scientific" evidence that reading literary fiction improves empathy.
For the experiment, participants either read a piece of literary fiction or popular fiction, followed by identifying facial emotions solely through the eyes. Those who read literary fiction scored consistently higher, by about 10%. "We believe that one critical difference between lit and pop fiction is the extent to which the characters are complex, ambiguous, difficult to get to know, etc. (in other words, human) versus stereotyped, simple," Castano wrote to Mic.
What exactly is the scientific definition of "literary" versus "popular" fiction? Is The Iliad literary or popular fiction? Was the answer in the time it was composed the same as now? Was it literary or popular when it was current? Isn't it usually the case that what was popular fiction centuries ago becomes literary fiction today, in great part because of the inaccessibility of the language used to describe the same sorts of emotional stimulus?
Of course, there are also cultural shifts to account for. "Your mind is ravaged by the gods." How often do you hear religious people say such things today? Even neo-pagans seem to picture their deities as bearing universal love.
But life is structured by conflict of interest, and minor conflicts are part of every day . Every time we eat, we kill something -- or someone else does the killing for us. The sacrifice of one life for another is not the exception, but the rule. How much empathy do any of us have? How much empathy could we stand to have and still be able to live?
Literature, since ancient times, was made to bring about catharsis. Selective empathy is conducive to that end. But every time we feel for one being, we must harden our heart against another. That is because what is good for the Greeks is not so good for the Trojans and vice versa. And that is why, in ancient times, each side had specific gods and goddesses to intercede on their behalf.
In order to survive, all of us have to have a taste for life. Which also means a taste for food. And here is an open secret: all food comes from other living beings. So a taste for life includes a taste for other life forms. We don't eat them because we hate them. We eat them because they are delicious!
All forms of life are imbued with some degree of intelligence, even plants. Did you know that plants can sense when they are being eaten?
Empathy is sometimes touted as a way out of all conflict. But it does not work that way. We can be perfectly aware that the cow, pig or lettuce we are eating has feelings, that in many ways all flesh and even all living beings are kin, but we still need to eat in order to survive. And they -- the other beings we eat -- still need to eat, too. So we feed our families, our pets and our livestock. And life goes on. It could not go on any other way.
On the fourth of July, Bow had ribs and mint ice cream, in addition to his staple foods of apples and a banana.
He separated the ribs and savored each one. He knows what ribs are. He called them by name.
The ice cream was good, too.
On Facebook, I see all sorts of really silly arguments about who is more "pro-life" -- those who want to protect unborn babies at other people's expense or those who want to protect babies who have already been born at other people's expense. What would you do if you were actually paying for it? You would protect your own babies, and leave the protection of other people's babies to other people. You would be for life, but your own would come first. That's how it works around here, both within my house and in the fields and woods all around it.
An ant carrying its prey up a wall
Everybody is pro-life, but nobody is willing to fight for every life, because it's impossible. Resources are scarce, and even though you may empathize with all living things, you have to pick sides in the battle for existence. So the question is not do you like life or living things, but which life has a priority for you. Life is messy. You have to make choices. And some of us believe that in the choices we make to benefit our own kin and our own kine, even those who are our antagonists eventually gain, not individually, but collectively.
I found a feather yesterday. I think it belonged to a blue jay.
Did it fall to the ground naturally? Was there a struggle? Birds do eat other birds. There is no solidarity among them, and primates eat other primates in the wild. But don't get me wrong. They are not cannibals. They don't eat their own. Not normally.
I saw a katydid outside the pen yesterday. There was a fly next to it. I did not quite understand the relationship between the two. Were they predator and prey? Or friends and allies?
The rabbits in my fields are moving closer and closer to the house. I like to see them, but I am also glad that there are coyotes out there that we hear at night, and feral cats whose eyes shine in the headlights of my car as I return home from late night grocery shopping, and maybe even an occasional fox. That's what keeps our rabbits healthy and hopping!
If you love life, if you have an appetite for it, and you want to keep all of it around you happy and healthy, then you understand that balance comes not from empathy or universal love, but from a healthy antagonism towards others. Celebrate diversity by all means, but please understand that life feeds off life.
Last night was the night of the Strawberry Moon. No, I did not get a good picture of it with my cell phone camera. So I will leave that to your imagination -- or you could check the blog of somebody who has a real camera.
But I did have some interesting experiences, possibly due to the full moon, and also a few thoughts to share.
Yesterday I ran across an article in the Atlantic about how literacy improves empathy. It was full of platitudes: reading about another person's experiences in a literary work (as opposed to say, low brow lit) improves our ability to empathize with others, according to the article. Then they gave some reasons why they think that, among them: literacy is something that has to be taught. Because it's unnatural, it makes us think more. And thinking leads to empathy, and so we are getting better and better, and are more empathetic than pre-literate people.
If you have connections, you can write anything in a prestigious journal and get it published. But really! That argument is full of holes. First of all, literacy does not have to be taught, any more than language has to be taught. It can be picked up, but it requires exposure. Like language itself, literacy is something few people would come up with on their own, because most do not invent their own language or their own alphabet. But with exposure in a social setting, we pick up the ambient language. And many children, including Bow, have also picked up the ability to read, without explicit instruction. Literacy happens when people who are pre-wired to decode are exposed to writing and language in a social setting.
Secondly, high literature predates writing. Many great classical works of literature, including parts of the Old Testament and the Iliad, existed as oral tradition before they were ever set down in writing. Writing does not beget literature. It merely helps to preserve it. And empathy, if we have any, is something we bring to literature: not something we gain from reading it. People without empathy can't get it out of a book.
Take Bow, for instance. He has empathy, because he can feel what another person feels without getting under their skin. He brings this empathy to bear every time he grooms me.
Bow has surgical instruments at his fingertips, and yet his touch when he examines me is soft and gentle. He can remove a mole with a single flick of a finger, and yet he examines each blemish on the surface of my skin with care. Like a doctor, he examines ears, eyes and nose to determine any signs of ill health or disease. But unlike most of today's doctors, he does it without asking for a fee.
Can empathy be taught? I don't think so. No more than literacy can be. It can be demonstrated, but we cannot expect to teach it to an unwilling and unmindful pupil. My experience is the same with readers of my books. You can take them on the journey, but they will not suffer along with the characters, if their mind is closed. To feel for another, you have to have feelings for yourself. Today, many humans have shut themselves down. They are blind to the sights that surround them, and they feel nothing that they have not somehow been given permission to feel by the society they live in.
Walking alone yesterday evening, I stayed open to the world around me. A snake was lying across my path, so I stepped aside and walked around it. But then curiosity got the better of me, and I turned back and tried to film it. The snake, wanting to avoid a confrontation, seeing that I was not leaving, decided to go back into the overgrown pasture.
It was an eastern yellow-bellied racer, a friend later told me on Facebook. Racer is a good name for it, as once it made up its mind to leave, it wasted no time in executing that decision.
I peered into the pasture, where I spotted a beautiful flower, which a Facebook friend later identified as common milkweed.
I continued along my path all the way to the western edge of my property, then headed back. On the way back, I came across a turtle. The turtle, being slow, allowed me to take more time to observe it.
There was exposed dirt where the turtle's hind quarters were moving, and at first I thought it was trying to dig its way out of the shallow hole it was in.
But when I shared the footage I got of the turtle with a Facebook friend, she told me it was female three-toed box turtle who was digging a nest to lay her eggs in.
I left her alone, thinking that whatever she was up to, she did not need my help to do it.
My friend says that seeing a female box turtle dig a nest in the wild is quite rare, because they usually do this in private where no one can see. But it was the evening of the strawberry moon, and the animals were coming out. I was glad I was there to see it.
Does empathy come from a book? I don't think so. Empathy means being able to feel for others, even those quite different from us. Empathy prepares people to understand what they read. It makes us better readers and better people. But empathy is not found between the pages of a book. It is found within us -- or not at all.
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