Dr. Tony Campolo has made a side career of speaking to multinational corporations, urging them to Do the Right Thing. And he puts feet on his words: for decades, he has been traveling to countries where powerful corporations exploit the local resources for their own gain, pitching in and getting a first-hand view of the situation. So he knows what he’s talking about when he gets up in front of a group of shareholders to report on conditions and encourage reform.
As an example, a number of Latin American countries have hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland in the hands of such companies, dedicated to the growing of coffee for US consumers – leaving too little farmland for the growing of food for the indigenous populations. (And let’s be clear: it’s not so that US coffee drinkers can have access to coffee; it’s just so they can have cheaper coffee.) Campolo’s mission is to get them to change their ways.
And when he speaks of this work, he shares stories about the poverty in which these populations live – including this one:
In the streets of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, you will find many crippled beggars with hands or bowls outstretched for coins. Campolo shares inside information about these beggars: many of them have been crippled from birth. Haitian parents in poverty, you see, break the limbs of their newborns so that they will grow up crippled; a crippled beggar brings in much more money for their family than a whole one, you see.
Why is he telling us this???
I’m telling you this because there’s more than one way to be crippled. And Haitians aren’t the only ones who cripple their own intentionally.
We do it here in the US – and even more insidiously.
I don’t want to underemphasize how monstrous it is to break the limbs of an infant – there are fewer more horrific acts one can imagine. But there are other cripplings that occur en masse that are just as monstrous, with even more tragic effects.
Here in the US – and in many nations in the First World – we are crippled from birth emotionally, our potential to flourish as human beings broken before we begin... and very, very intentionally.
We know from our deep studies of human prehistory that human beings lived very differently for more than 2,000 centuries, prior to the time we achieved “civilization”, about 10,000 years ago. Until the most recent Ice Age ended, we lived far more closely and intensely than we do today; the separation and isolation that we as individuals in the modern era take for granted were inconceivable until a few short millennia ago. We were, socially, a very different species.
We are naturally empathetic. There’s a principle in psychology called “the Theory of Mind”. It posits that when one human being looks at another, they understand that there’s somebody in there – someone like themselves. The cornerstone of our ability to relate to one another, to understand one another, to feel emotion for one another beyond the raising of the young, is all based on this principle. And where does it come from? We look into each other’s eyes.
Only two anthropoid species do this – human beings and bonobos. This is significant, because our sibling species, the chimpanzee, does not. Chimpanzees track one another’s shoulder movements, not their eyes. And what differences result?
Chimpanzees base their social order on dominance and competition; they are combative and quarrelsome. Bonobos, on the other hand, are far more cooperative; they do not practice social dominance, but revere experience and maturity in their elder tribal members – of both genders.
We are built to see the humanity in other humans. We are built to do unto others as we would have done to us. It’s in our genes.
We are naturally cooperative. Human beings are the most successful, sophisticated cooperators on Earth. As individuals, we aren’t particularly fast, alert, or dangerous; we are, in fact, easy targets for many dozens of other species (most of them smaller than we are). But together, we can take down the mightiest behemoths the world has served up in our time.
Moreover, when we cooperate, we are astonishingly competent; we can shape the world as we please, carving habitat in any environs, facing down all of nature’s challenges. Alone, we can do little; together, we can change the course of mighty rivers.
This, too, is built into us; we are the descendants of those ancestors in the very distant past who did the best job of working with their tribes, for those tribes were the ones most likely to survive and thrive. Our legacy in this domain is rich – and unprecedented in the story of life.
We are naturally trusting. Reproducing as we do, our young remain dependent upon others much longer than in most species – and this protracted youth has only extended with time. Our young must remain intimately connected to the family for years, before having even the possibility of autonomy – and that requires a vast abundance of trust.
Here, too, nature has built this into us: it’s found in a neuropeptide produced in the hypothalamus called oxytocin, and some scientists have identified it as the very engine of human morality. It is the mechanism that connects a nursing child to its mother’s breast, triggered by simple touch. It causes mother and child to bond, to turn to one another; and that neurochemical mechanism remains in place throughout our lives, in many contexts. It’s the basis of pair-bonding; it’s why we hug. It’s why we kiss. It’s why we put our arm around the shoulder of another, and why we sometimes cuddle when we sleep.
And in our ancient past, of course, we lived far more tactile lives – touch was much more ubiquitous than today. But you’d expect that, since we didn’t need clothing of any kind until we migrated to Europe...
We are naturally altruistic. Great arguments have rolled on, decade after decade, about the role of altruism in human development. Many argue that it isn’t real; that altruism is not a natural impulse of the human animal or any other – that we are naturally selfish.
It was George Price, an intellectual born in 1922, who took the Hamilton Rule – an equation constructed to provide a metric of human altruism – and reconceived it as a proof of human ‘group selection’, the tendency of cooperative human groups to out-survive competitive ones.7 This idea is fought by some academics even today, but the naturalist E.O. Wilson has nurtured it into general favor in recent years.
And a growing body of research supports this theoretical concept: a number of studies have demonstrated that very young children will offer to help adults with tasks they don’t even understand, for which there is no apparent gain for themselves, and will share with their peers without ever being prompted. We are naturally inclined to give to others of our kind, even when there is no obvious profit.
Empathy... cooperation... trust... altruism. The four limbs of human social cognition, generously provided by our genes at birth.
And what does modern Western society do to us, from birth? It breaks all four limbs – and we grow up crippled.
From the age we can run and play, society sends the message that our affection and understanding must be confined to the tightest circle possible – those who are most like us. We receive the message, from church and state and market, that those who do not look as we do or act as we do or believe as we do are not like us; they are somehow less human. Our natural reserves of empathy are curtailed, truncated... broken.
From the age we can run and play, we are trained to compete, not cooperate; we are indoctrinated into the idea that we must be better at this or that than others, in order to thrive; we are shown that success in the modern world is about winning, victory, dominance – not participating in group effort.
To be sure, group effort exists and is praised, in sports teams and military units and project groups in the workplace – but even there, it’s about beating the other team, the other army, the marketplace competitor. We are not trained to work together simply to grow and thrive, without the impetus of dominating an opponent. The natural impulse to cooperate with others is... broken.
From the age we can run and play, we are carefully taught to trust the voices of immediate authority in our world, and to distrust all others. We must listen to the adults in our social circle, and to be wary of voices in circles beyond our own. We are to trust only those who practice our faith; to only listen to the leaders of our political party; we are convinced, over time, to believe that trust in others with different ideas or other viewpoints are dangerous, trying to harm us, intent on ruling over us.
And society has built up formidable walls that hold back our instinct to believe in the humanity of other humans, beyond our contrived differences. War, of course, is the most insidious of these. But even there, when a crack appears in the wall, human trust emerges.8
This exception proves the rule: our natural impulse to trust others of our kind has been... broken.
From the time we can run and play, we are trained to believe that “There is no free lunch!”, that “You can’t get something for nothing!”, and “No one helps anyone but themselves!” We are taught the greatest of human lies: autonomy, the idea that we can make it on our own, without relying on anybody else.
And yet, when society breaks enough that the rules it presses down upon us all are forced by tragic circumstance to relax – when natural calamity has destroyed a town, for instance – most people inevitably choose to give, to offer their resources, to contribute with no thought of return. And when crisis fades sufficiently that society’s edicts can clank down in place once again, everyone goes back behind their own gate.
Our natural impulse to give with no thought of return is... broken.
In all four cases, the ideas that bring about our crippling come from suspect sources. The ideas that we are not naturally empathetic or cooperative or trusting or altruistic are the province of ideologies; they are embedded in religious and political dogmas, self-serving social creeds of groups in power. They have nothing to do with the evidence of our genes, the truths of our ancient past, or the innocent behaviors of the very young.
No, this crippling comes to us at the hands of the shareholders of social power. And it falls upon us for reasons as empty as cheaper coffee.
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