The Kindness of Strangers

CHAPTER 1

A GOLDEN AGE OF COMPASSION

This book is about one of the great zoological wonders of the world. I’m not talking about the tears of the elephant, the smile of the dolphin, the politics of the chimpanzee, the consciousness of the octopus, the peacock’s tail, the kingdom of the ants, or the wisdom of the birds or the bees or the dogs. I’m talking about a scrawny, brainy ape with the habit of helping strangers—often risking time and treasure and occasionally even life and limb to do so. It’s about you and me, and how we treat everybody else. It’s about the kindness of strangers.

When it comes to compassion for strangers, the human species is in a class of its own. Chimpanzees, like humans, regularly help kith and kin, but the number of chimpanzees who dive into swollen rivers to save drowning strangers, or send food to families of needy chimps in Tanzania, or perform weekend volunteer work at chimpanzee retirement homes, is zero. Year after year after year after year (do this 8 million times), no chimpanzee lifts a finger to help a stranger. No less a naturalist than Charles Darwin saw the gulf between humans’ and chimpanzees’ capacity for caring as one of the most blindingly obvious behavioral differences between the two species:

Let’s try to comprehend what the chimpanzees cannot. In contrast to our closest primate cousins, more than 150 people in the United States and nearly 100 in Great Britain donate a kidney to a complete stranger each year.² The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem honors more than 27,000 non-Jews who risked their lives and their liberty to rescue Jewish people during the Holocaust.³ The Carnegie Corporation has recognized more than 10,000 ordinary Americans who knowingly put themselves in grave danger in order to rescue someone from death. One out of every five of those Carnegie medals was awarded posthumously because the honoree had died while trying to help.⁴ Most heroes, of course, don’t get a medal at all.

Humans also help strangers in a variety of less heroic ways. In the month after the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, 40,000 New Yorkers lined up to donate blood.⁵ Each month, nearly 4 billion adults around the world help a stranger in need, 2.3 billion donate money to a charitable organization, and more than 1.6 billion perform volunteer work.⁶ Americans alone commit $600 billion worth of cash and volunteer labor annually to organizations that promote health, education, and human welfare.⁷ Two-thirds of British adults engage in a charitable activity at least once per month.⁸

Humans’ generous spirit is also revealed by the activities of their governments on behalf of their most vulnerable citizens. On average, the rich nations of the developed world commit 21 percent of their gross domestic incomes (GDIs) to domestic social spending, which includes money for retirement pensions, health insurance, unemployment insurance, family benefits, disability benefits, food subsidies, and housing support, plus an additional 5 percent of their GDIs to education.⁹ You might not think of domestic social spending as “generosity toward strangers”: after all, we don’t pay our taxes gladly. All the same, until 150 years ago, the notion that the state was responsible for meeting such a broad array of human needs didn’t exist anywhere. Then it existed everywhere.

And let’s not forget the $150 billion worth of official development assistance and humanitarian aid that the world’s governments and nongovernmental agencies share with the world’s neediest countries each year. Sure, these contributions amount to just a fraction of a percent of most donor nations’ GDIs. Even so, $100 billion here, $100 billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.¹⁰

Part of what makes modern generosity toward strangers so remarkable is the seemingly long odds against it. By most scientific accounts, the humans from whom we are descended were fanatically xenophobic, ready to greet needy strangers not with clean water, a hot meal, or a place to lay their heads for the night, but with spears and arrows instead. Just a few days before I sat down to draft these words, in fact, a Christian missionary from the United States was pinioned with arrows by members of a still-uncontacted tribe of hunter-gatherers on Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal. Later, the Sentinelese dragged the missionary’s body out to the beach and buried it there. What makes our attitudes toward strangers so different from theirs? Modern humans’ concern for the welfare of perfect strangers has no analog in the rest of the animal kingdom or even in most of our own history as a species. It’s a true one-off. As such, it calls out for a special explanation.

Most modern historians have tried to help us understand the history of human generosity by serving it up one small bite at a time. One historian writes about philanthropy in ancient Athens, another about almsgiving in medieval Europe, another about the Elizabethan Poor Laws of sixteenth-century England, another about the nineteenth-century stirrings of the modern welfare state, and still another about twentieth-century efforts to eliminate poverty from the face of the Earth.

Other scholars, admittedly fewer in number today than a century ago, have sought to explain the rise of generosity as the result of historians’ own version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: civilization. The Irish historian William Hartpole Lecky was one of the major exponents of the civilizationist theory of moral progress. In Lecky’s view, humanity’s regard for the welfare of strangers resulted from a centuries-long civilizing process in which superstition, xenophobia, and a stultifying satisfaction with the status quo were replaced by reason, cosmopolitanism, and a spirit of experimentation and self-improvement. A widening of the breadth of human charity came along for the ride. As Lecky wrote in his two-volume History of European Morals in 1869, “history tells us that, as civilisation advances, the charity of men becomes at once warmer and more expansive, their habitual conduct both more gentle and more temperate, and their love of truth more sincere.”¹¹ Many other Victorian writers were civilizationists (also known as progressives) as well. Darwin himself was a civilizationist of sorts, as were many of the reformers responsible for the social innovations that we still rely on today to assist strangers.

Despite historians’ many invaluable contributions to our understanding of the kindness of strangers, the one-bite-at-a-timers and the civilizationists alike have committed one important oversight: in their efforts to explain altruism and compassion using the standard tools of the historian, they have failed to grapple with the natural human faculties—our characteristic beliefs, desires, motivations, emotions, and cognitive powers—that were activated on a mass scale by the twists and turns of history to produce the penchant for helping strangers that we indulge today. To quote the cognitive scientist Pascal Boyer, minds make societies.¹² Thus, to fully explain how Homo sapiens came to greet needy strangers with compassion rather than cruelty, we have to understand why people believe what they believe, ponder what they ponder, and want what they want—and how they then figure out how to get it. We have to explain how a human mind that is built for a stone-aged world in which strangers were feared and killed can fashion a world for itself in which strangers are respected and assisted.

Complementing the historians’ approach to explaining human generosity is an approach that comes from the evolutionary sciences. For several decades, evolutionary biologists and evolutionary social scientists have been obsessed with humans’ generosity toward strangers, precisely because of its seeming implausibility. How could a penchant for wasting valuable resources on complete strangers evolve? After all, natural selection runs on reproductive fitness, and reproductive fitness runs on resources, so the more resources you keep for yourself, the better. Wouldn’t evolution punish people who got into the habit of giving stuff away to nobody in particular?

Among modern Darwinians, explanations for generosity toward strangers come in two forms. First, there are those who argue that strangers were a prominent feature of the ancestral human environment, and that our ancestors in fact were able to obtain better Darwinian fitness by helping them. According to proponents of this “stranger-adaptation” hypothesis, we help strangers in the modern world because evolution designed us specifically to do so, circuitous though that design process must have been.

Second, there are those who argue that generosity toward strangers is merely a by-product of evolved instincts for taking care of our friends and relatives. When we help strangers in the modern world, these scholars argue, we are following ancient rules of thumb that worked well enough in a world in which meeting someone for the first time was a reasonably good indicator that you’d meet them again in the future (at which point they would have the opportunity to return your kindness). They argue further that in our modern world, those ancient rules of thumb cause us to mistakenly help strangers whom we will never meet again, which in the eyes of natural selection really does amount to throwing your help away. The biologist Richard Dawkins refers to these modern-day errors of altruism as blessed mistakes:

Despite the differences between the stranger-adaptationists and the blessed-mistakers, members of both evolutionary camps end up predicting that humans will display an abiding interest in the welfare of strangers—either because we were in a profound sense designed to care about strangers or because the ubiquity of strangers in our daily lives causes us to mistake them (unconsciously) for friends and loved ones. We can no more stop ourselves from wanting to help strangers in need, if the evolutionists are right, than we can stop our stomachs from growling when we’re hungry.

These evolutionary explanations have their own blind spots, albeit different ones from those of the historian. The weakness of the stranger-adaptationists’ approach is its inability to account for the reams of empirical evidence that our minds are actually quite poorly designed for motivating us to look after the welfare of strangers. The research indicates instead that our intuitive interest in the welfare of strangers—particularly when weighed against the strength of our intuitive interest in our own welfare, as well as the welfare of our friends and loved ones—is fickle, reluctant, and easily distracted. The evidence that evolution has tuned our minds for active concern for the welfare of strangers, as we will soon see, is thin indeed.

Additionally, the blessed-mistakers’ argument that compassion for strangers is the result of the cognitive systems that motivate us to care about family and friends must contend with an important principle of natural selection: those cognitive systems are likely to contain sophisticated fail-safes and identity-verification procedures that are designed to prevent us from helping strangers “by accident.” Mistakes are costly—even the blessed ones—so natural selection designed us to avoid those mistakes whenever possible. And as we will see, we do try to avoid them whenever possible. Yes, we evolved to help our kin, but we also evolved to be able to distinguish kin from non-kin. And yes, we evolved to help people who would likely help us in return in the future, but as an appurtenance to that faculty, we also evolved to be able to distinguish people who are likely to reciprocate from those who aren’t. Our evolved social instincts and sympathies are highly relevant to understanding the kindness of strangers, but stranger-adaptation and blessed-mistake theories are too simplistic.

Many evolutionary perspectives on generosity toward strangers also fail to take recent human history seriously enough, no doubt because evolutionists are primarily interested in natural selection, which needs eons to create complex functional design. As a result, they don’t spend enough time considering the causal pathways by which our generosity toward strangers has effloresced over the past ten thousand years.

Finally, evolutionists also tend to overlook two important mental faculties. The first is our ability to follow our incentives. Like other animals, we can track the paths of action that will lead us to the things we care about—food, shelter, clothing, fame, a city free of disease and crime, a prosperous national economy, fidelity to our ethical convictions, a meaningful life. We can then construct courses of action that will lead us closer to those things we desire. Second, and relatedly, modern evolutionists often overlook our capacity for reason. Humans evolved both to produce reasons—that is, to offer justifications for their beliefs and convictions—and to process reasons—that is, to evaluate the justifications that others offer for their beliefs and convictions. For too long, evolutionists have been allergic to psychological explanations for behavior that rely on seemingly general-purpose cognitive abilities such as “tracking incentives” and “reasoning.” However, as we will see, these faculties are indispensable for a complete account of our concern for strangers today.¹⁴ You just can’t explain it without them.

Fittingly enough, it was Darwin himself who fashioned our social instincts and our intellective powers into a scientific explanation for the vast expansion of human concern over the past ten millennia. “Any animal whatsoever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included,” Darwin began,

Darwin surmised further that those “well-marked social instincts” that motivate our concern for kith, kin, and compatriots, in spite of their parochiality, were recruited into service more recently in human history to promote our regard for the welfare of all of humanity. And it was our capacity for reasoning, he averred, that did the recruiting:

Later in the same chapter from his 1871 book The Descent of Man, Darwin drove his argument home again, almost apologetically, as if he were worried that he had begun to beat a dead horse:

The argument I tender in this book is similar to Darwin’s own, and it is a straightforward one. I argue that the kindness of strangers is built upon a surprisingly small number—four, in fact—of our evolved human instincts. These include two of the instincts that Darwin called our “social instincts”—our instinct for helping others in hopes of receiving help in return, and our instinct for helping others in pursuit of glory—as well as the instincts Darwin called our “active intellectual powers,” especially our ability to track incentives and our capacity for reason.

I argue further that the kindness of strangers emerged over the past ten millennia through seven different confrontations with mass suffering, and the solutions that our social instincts and our active intellective powers commended as solutions to those confrontations. To be sure, those seven historical encounters with want and woe engaged our basic social instincts—we helped in search of return favors and in search of glory—but they also engaged our ability to figure out what is important to us and our ability to reason our way to plans for how to obtain what is important to us. In short, our ancestors’ encounters with mass suffering created threats and opportunities to which they applied their powers of reasoning to figure out how best to respond. And those responses turned out to be compassionate ones.

Although our social instincts and our capacity for reason furnished us with the desire to care about strangers, I argue that it was progress in three human endeavors—technology, science, and trade—that furnished us with the ability to care. We have Carnegie Heroes, Holocaust Rescuers, and anonymous kidney donors; we devote effort and resources to looking after the poor in our own countries; and we reach across seas, across borders, and even across generations to ease strangers’ burdens not only because we want to, but also because we can.

In the upcoming chapter, I begin to lay out this argument by introducing the psychological obstacles that prevent us from taking an intuitive interest in the welfare of strangers. Without conscious, deliberative effort, the research from social and cognitive psychology shows, the human mind is breathtakingly insensate to the welfare of strangers. If natural selection really did design our minds to motivate us to care about strangers, as the stranger-adaptationists assert, then it must have been some pretty shoddy design work.

In Chapters 3 through 6, I will introduce you to those “social instincts and sympathies” that Darwin surmised to be the raw materials out of which our compassion for the distant stranger was fashioned. In the modern language of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, these instincts and sympathies are the products of evolved cognitive systems—little computational devices that exist in our brains as networks of neurons and synapses—that natural selection fashioned in order to motivate us to care about our friends, our relatives, and our compatriots. I begin in Chapter 3 with a cook’s tour of natural selection. In Chapters 4 through 6, I explore what those Darwinian social instincts and sympathies can offer to help us explain the kindness of strangers. As these chapters will show, and contrary to what Darwin seems to have surmised, it’s only a small number of our “social instincts and sympathies” that actually make a difference.

From Chapters 7 through 13, each chapter is devoted to one of the seven confrontations with mass suffering that compelled our ancestors to think about the needs of strangers and how they should respond to them. Through this ten-thousand-year history of human compassion, I will show you how our social instincts and sympathies, along with our capacity for reason, interacted to produce the innovations and institutions that we still turn to today.

In Chapter 14, the book’s final chapter, I’ll weave the natural history and the human history back together, describing the instincts, the reasons, and the progress in technology, science, and trade that have conspired over the past ten millennia to create humanity’s compassion for humankind.