Eamonn Toland's Blog
June 2, 2021
If people are naturally kind, why is there so much cruelty?
Are humans naturally inclined towards cruelty or kindness? The question has perplexed philosophers and scientists for centuries.
The Chinese thinker Mencius was one of the earliest proponents of the “human nature is good” theory, while Jean-Jacques Rousseau made the case forcefully during the Enlightenment. More recently, psychologists and evolutionary biologists point to evidence of kindness “hard wired” in toddlers. Sharing and collaboration seem to be instinctive from an early age.
But settling the argument is another matter, and proving that altruism has an evolutionary advantage in a world driven by “survival of the fittest” has remained elusive. In the case of American geneticist George Price (1922-1975), the search contributed to a spiral into depression. Dispirited at the failure to find a scientific cause for kindness, he gave away all his possessions and spent his last years in destitution.
For Dubliner Éamonn Toland, the question first surfaced while he was at university in Oxford. In his book THE PURSUIT OF KINDNESS: AN EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF HUMAN NATURE, he explores how societies set different moral norms from the time homo sapiens first emerged around 300,000 years ago. He broadly concurs with Dutch historian Rutger Bregman who says humans were by default co-operative and friendly until nomadic hunter-gatherers settled down, inventing among other things private property.
Bregman, in his recent book Humankind, dates the demise of what he calls “Homo Puppy” to about 10,000 years ago. Toland puts it a few thousand years earlier, noting that the oldest evidence of mass-scale warfare is a 13,000-year-old grave in the Jebel Sahaba region of Sudan. Inevitably, there is a degree of speculation – no one can travel back in time to see just how our ancestors lived. But Toland sees evidence of innate sociability today. He says “the crucial thing is that we need a story” to justify cruelty, and he builds on the argument with historical examples from the Crusades to the Holocaust. “We are not monsters, and in order to circumvent our kindness instinct we have to tell a story to ourselves to do awful things.”
The instinct to err on the side of compassion is diminished in a world where relationships are less reciprocal. Vulture funds can be ruthless in extracting rent safe in the knowledge they’ll never have to meet their tenants. Anonymous tweeters can join pile-ons under the assumption that they will never need the mercy of others.
Does modern society make us cruel? “In some way modern society is an attempt to come up with solutions to complexity,” Toland replies. Shared concepts of justice and a “rule of law” help to keep us in line, he says, although maintaining kindness today “takes substantial cognitive effort in order to check our own biases”.
Toland might not be the first to plough this furrow but the case he makes is utterly convincing. The way he tells it, he is just following the science and, with echoes of cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, encourages us to resist our negativity bias.
“We need a new story or maybe to revive an old story, which is to start with the realisation that we are naturally predisposed to kindness and collaboration. That’s who we are.”
Joe Humphreys, Irish Times
The Chinese thinker Mencius was one of the earliest proponents of the “human nature is good” theory, while Jean-Jacques Rousseau made the case forcefully during the Enlightenment. More recently, psychologists and evolutionary biologists point to evidence of kindness “hard wired” in toddlers. Sharing and collaboration seem to be instinctive from an early age.
But settling the argument is another matter, and proving that altruism has an evolutionary advantage in a world driven by “survival of the fittest” has remained elusive. In the case of American geneticist George Price (1922-1975), the search contributed to a spiral into depression. Dispirited at the failure to find a scientific cause for kindness, he gave away all his possessions and spent his last years in destitution.
For Dubliner Éamonn Toland, the question first surfaced while he was at university in Oxford. In his book THE PURSUIT OF KINDNESS: AN EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF HUMAN NATURE, he explores how societies set different moral norms from the time homo sapiens first emerged around 300,000 years ago. He broadly concurs with Dutch historian Rutger Bregman who says humans were by default co-operative and friendly until nomadic hunter-gatherers settled down, inventing among other things private property.
Bregman, in his recent book Humankind, dates the demise of what he calls “Homo Puppy” to about 10,000 years ago. Toland puts it a few thousand years earlier, noting that the oldest evidence of mass-scale warfare is a 13,000-year-old grave in the Jebel Sahaba region of Sudan. Inevitably, there is a degree of speculation – no one can travel back in time to see just how our ancestors lived. But Toland sees evidence of innate sociability today. He says “the crucial thing is that we need a story” to justify cruelty, and he builds on the argument with historical examples from the Crusades to the Holocaust. “We are not monsters, and in order to circumvent our kindness instinct we have to tell a story to ourselves to do awful things.”
The instinct to err on the side of compassion is diminished in a world where relationships are less reciprocal. Vulture funds can be ruthless in extracting rent safe in the knowledge they’ll never have to meet their tenants. Anonymous tweeters can join pile-ons under the assumption that they will never need the mercy of others.
Does modern society make us cruel? “In some way modern society is an attempt to come up with solutions to complexity,” Toland replies. Shared concepts of justice and a “rule of law” help to keep us in line, he says, although maintaining kindness today “takes substantial cognitive effort in order to check our own biases”.
Toland might not be the first to plough this furrow but the case he makes is utterly convincing. The way he tells it, he is just following the science and, with echoes of cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, encourages us to resist our negativity bias.
“We need a new story or maybe to revive an old story, which is to start with the realisation that we are naturally predisposed to kindness and collaboration. That’s who we are.”
Joe Humphreys, Irish Times
