Mutants

 

Maybe it's time we talked about mutants. No, not cool mutants with cool powers. I'm talking about the ever-growing minority who seem to have been born without the gene for empathy. Call them homo miserabilis. How long have they been among us? Are they here to stay? Does their mutation give them an advantage over homo sapiens that will eventually write our demise as a species? Is there some sort of treatment we can administer? Can we co-exist with them? I would have preferred mutations like eye-blasts and teleportation, and would have gotten along fine with our blue furry cousins. But evolution is an asshole.

Okay, maybe these narcissists—let’s call them what they are— aren’t mutants, but I became curious about the seeming decline of empathy, which a lot of people seem to have noticed and become alarmed by. Is all the evidence simply anecdotal? Turns out not. Here are two developments:

1. Science has (tentatively) found a biological basis for empathy. Nature and nurture are the usual suspects.

2. A measurable fact: empathy is declining. And that should trouble all of us. And, concurrently, narcissism seems to be on the increase. Maybe we should view empathy and narcissism as two ends of a spectrum. We’re all on the spectrum.

Let’s look at the second point (just to be contrary) first. The seminal research in this area comes from Dr. Sara Konrath of the Institute for Social Research. In surveys of college students that from the late 1970s to 2010, the average level of “perspective taking,” people’s ability to imagine others’ points of view, declined by 34 percent. She reported an especially steep decline between 2000 and 2009. And the same study found a 30% increase in narcissism.

Now to the first point. There are two aspects to empathy: the cognitive and the affective. In other words, the recognition that others think and act as ourselves, and the formulating of an appropriate response to those acts. The brain always involves the heart in its big decisions.

I’ll focus on the cognitive, because I think in this case cognition precedes affect. And we’ll begin with two words: mirror neurons. These were discovered in the 90s by researchers literally trying to unravel the “monkey see, monkey do” riddle.

These are neurons discovered in both primates and birds that fire both when an individual performs an action and sees a similar action performed by another individual. Think of mirror neurons as a sort of embryonic telepathy. The neuron “mirrors” the action of another. These neurons are located in the parts of the brain that govern the control of movement and the sense of touch (I’ll spare you the scientific names.). Maybe this is why hugs are so therapeutic. They’re the purest expression of empathy.

Neuroscientists like Marco Iacoboni of UCLA’s Brain Mapping Center believe this mirror system helps humans to understand the acts and intentions of others—the prerequisite for empathy. (Could it also be the basis of anthropomorphism? Somebody get on that.)*

One caveat: these studies are pre-Covid, which means…what? Has enforced isolation rendered us lonelier and thus more inclined toward empathy, or has the divide between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers served as a further wedge between people?

Another caveat: empathy research is still a new field and many of its findings are tentative, hedged about with recommendations for further research.

*(Somebody is on that. This effect is the fulcrum for artificial empathy, the intentional training of chatbots to imitate the patterns of human empathy, using language to ape emotional nuance and positive reinforcement. The ability to mimic human identity may lead users to believe that chatbots are thinking, feeling entities—which they most certainly are not. The mirror neurons are firing, but it’s a funhouse mirror.)

What’s the reason for this decline in empathy? Well, most point to the internet. You may get the idea that the internet has become the go-to whipping boy for all of today’s ills. Hey, you’ll say, aren’t you communicating to us right now on the internet? Communicating with the whole world on the internet? Doesn’t the net in fact bring the world to your doorstep?

That’s the paradox of the internet. It makes the world smaller while increasing the distance between its inhabitants.The internet does two other things which may. be obvious:

it isolates us physically from other humans, which means many of the clues transmitted physically are lost, the million gestures, sounds, and scents which make up humanity, which provide clues to the personality. Those mirror neurons need visual signals to fire. Online connections are thin gruel compared to the feast of the senses each soul concocts for us.

According to the Zurich Insurance Group, “In a recent study, technology was cited as a major cause of loneliness and social isolation by 58 percent of survey respondents in the United States and 50 percent in the United Kingdom.”

And it allows for radical self-selection of groups, the so-called social media bubbles, so that anyone outside the group becomes the Other: unknowable, alien, probably hostile. This behavior is aided and abetted by recommendation algorithms which govern most popular platforms, narrowing your perception of the planet.

There are other possible factors. Blame is also laid on the self-esteem movement in education in the 2000s. In John Lennon’s words:

Who you think you are? A superstar?

Well, alright, you are.

We all shone on, like the moon and the stars and the sun.

But self-esteem can blossom into narcissism if you start believing you’re the only superstar. Other factors like shrinking families (fewer siblings to model empathy on), and the growth of single-person households also contribute to this phenomenon.

Since I asked the question, how do genetics figure into this equation? Minimally. Variations in empathy seem to have a genetic component of about 10%. If that measure is changing, no one’s caught it yet. We’re more likely to have Charles Xavier’s students walking among us. (By the way, if you suspected women were more empathetic than men? You’re right. And if you thought more men were narcissistic? Right again.)

Empathy has become so downgraded that some people are downright hostile to the idea. Elon Musk famously said “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” And there’s a term gaining currency in right-wing circles: toxic empathy.

In the book Toxic Empathy, social media personality Allie Beth Stuckey argues that “empathy has become a tool of manipulation by left-wing activists who bully people into believing that they must adopt progressive positions to be loving. She explores the five most heated issues through which toxic empathy is deployed: abortion, gender, sexuality, immigration, and social justice.”

I didn’t realize you got to be an authority on empathy by being a Mean Girl.

So is empathy going the way of the dodo bird and a good 5¢ cigar? There is hope actually.

And now, the rest of the story

… as Paul Harvey used to say in his stone-skipping baritone. Empathy may be a homeostatic, self-correcting system. It may actually be on the upswing. What’s the impetus for this startling, heartening turnaround? Loneliness. Man is a herd animal, after all. You can’t breed that out of the species overnight.

Remember that I said these studies covered the late 1970s to 2009. Well, UW-Green Bay Professor Alison Jane Martingano (partnering with the afore-mentioned Konrath) has news from 2024. Again depending on surveys from undergrads, levels of empathy seemed to increase from 2008 to 2018. They found that “empathy increased when socializing decreased and loneliness increased.” This flies in the face of most scholarly assumptions, but paradox seems to be the order of the day. We’ll let the scientists sort it out.

Empathy is a precious resource, to be guarded and nurtured every day. Every day we must remember that we have more in common with those across the street and across the world than we have differences. How can we cultivate empathy within ourselves? It’s kind of embarrassing that the best primer I’ve discovered is in an old song by Joe South called Walk a Mile in My Shoes. It was actually a hit in 1970 when people actually wrote socially conscious songs. The lyrics started out like this:

If I could be you, if you could be me
For just one hour
If we could find a way
To get inside each other's mind

If you could see you through my eyes
Instead of your ego
I believe you'd be
Surprised to see
That you've been blind