Politically Correct Apes

The following is from a review in The Economist of the book The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society by Frans de Waal. I've bolded the key bit:

EVERY day the world seems more like Aesop’s “Fables”. Rooks are found to use ingenious tools; dolphins are overheard talking to whales; and pigs, while not yet flying, play a passable game of football—at least according to the BBC. As for apes, they would hardly make headlines any more if they were found to be adept at composing limericks.

Frans de Waal, a primatologist in the psychology department of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, is perhaps best known for his studies of bonobos—the so-called “politically correct” apes who are somewhat feminist, often resolve disputes by making love instead of war, and with whom humans share as much of their DNA as they do with chimpanzees. His new book, “The Age of Empathy”, looks at altruism and sympathetic fellow-feeling in both humans and other animals.

His title has a double-meaning: empathy is both very old and freshly topical. It is as ancient as the entire mammalian line, he argues, engaging areas of the brain that developed in our distant ancestors over 100m years ago. And we are also entering a new age of empathy, he thinks, brought on by the financial crisis (the product of a selfishly oriented system), and marked by America’s election of President Barack Obama, who has re-emphasised the importance of compassion and helping one’s neighbour.

The book is a polemic, and its main target is what Mr de Waal takes to be a distorted idea of human life as relentlessly selfish and ruthlessly competitive. As an antidote to this picture, he offers plenty of evidence of apparently selfless sacrifice, unforced sympathy, co-operation and even a keen sense of fairness in our closest animal relatives, who evolved to reap the benefits of mutual aid. In other words, his answer to Thomas Hobbes’s famously gloomy statement that man’s existence tends to be “nasty, brutish and short” is, in effect, that it is unfair to brutes. Beasts are not actually all that beastly, and so we need not be either. Nature does not force us to be selfish.

I see green shoots everywhere. Not economic green shoots, but the green shoots of a moral reform. The above is just another example of how people are waking up from the ideological slumber of the last 30 years of the "me, me, me" generation of the 70s that morphed into the homo economicus who viewed life as a competition to "win all the toys".

But the ideologues of politics will not retreat gently into the night. As the article points out:

Don’t we already know that people can be rather good at co-operating, and are not always mercilessly hostile towards their rivals? Yet Mr de Waal does manage to spring some pleasing and intriguing surprises on this score: how many people are aware, for example, that most soldiers are unwilling to fire at the enemy, even in battle? On the other hand, politics can be a much bloodier battleground than war, as any advocate of a “kinder society” soon finds out.