Frans de Waal, a leading primatology professor, gave a thought-provoking synopsis of his latest research (The Age of Empathy: Nature’s lesson for a Kinder Society) in the Sunday Observer 19/9/10. This research once again throws doubt on the prevailing wisdom that sport, and life generally, are primarily governed by our animalistic, competitive human natures. De Waal gets straight to the point in his articulate summation when asked by Robin McKie about the importance of empathy in the evolution of Homo Sapians:

It (empathy) has been extremely important. It holds our societies together and drives us to care for the sick and the elderly for example. It also allows us to get on in cities. Chimpanzees which can be very tolerant of others would simply not put up with being surrounded by strangers of their own species and would start killing one another. Humans do not do this. They put up with masses of strangers around them. In that sense we are very strange: we can tolerate others in huge numbers.

On this very point I often marvel at how well London has coped with the vast influx of East Europeans recently. Yes, there was some legitimate moaning on the building sites about labour rates being forced down, but generally speaking, half a million newcomers were accepted into the tribe with barely a ripple. In every town and high street, signs of the East European migration were evident, yet within months the new arrivals were quickly and efficiently adopted to become part of the rich London tapestry. And despite the ugly rhetoric and some racist violence from the BNP and their likes, it has been a similar success story for West Indians, Africans and Asians of all persuasions. Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood did not eventuate. Most of us just quietly learned to get on with each other.

When asked if it is harmful to focus on our alleged selfishness, Frans de Waal draws very clear conclusions for modern society:

Yes. It is extremely dangerous. Many economists are great believers in the idea that everything in nature is competitive and that we should set up a society which is competitive to reflect that. Anyone that cannot keep up, well too bad. I believe that is a total misrepresentation of the facts. The individual is not all-important. Yes, we can be selfish but we are also highly empathetic and supportive. These features define us and should be built into society.

From a biological perspective, it seems that de Waal is very much in tune with Dawkins, both of whom are at pains to distinguish between how genetic evolution may operate on a selfish dimension whereas a complete human entity may operate in a very empathetic and cooperative way. Robin Mckie raises the question directly with de Waal:

“Most interpretations present evolution as a selfish process. Do you believe this blinds us to understand the importance of cooperation?”

The professor replies:

Although a characteristic may have evolved for a selfish reason that does not mean it operates, psychologically, in a selfish way. That is why empathy evolved.

It appears that Margaret Thatcher and her Chicago School followers missed out on that stage of evolution.

The biological findings of De Waal are supported by the historical findings of Chris Harman who is at pains, in his impressive, A People’s History of the World, to underline the egalitarianism and altruism of our hunter and gatherer ancestors. Harman writes:

Hunters and gatherers were necessarily intensely dependent on one another. The gatherers usually supplied the most reliable source of food, and the hunters that which was most valued. So those who specialised in hunting depended on their daily survival on the generosity of those who gathered, while those who specialised in gathering and those who were temporarily unsuccessful in the hunt – relied on valued additions to their diet on those who managed to kill animals. P8

And to underline the cooperative nature of the hunt, Harman adds:

The hunt itself did not usually consist of an individual male hero going off to make a kill, but comprised a group of men (sometimes with the auxiliary assistance of women and children) working together to chase and trap a prey. At every point the premium was on cooperation and collective values. Without them no band of foragers could have survived more than a few days. P8

Supporting Marx’s classification of early tribal life as primitive communism Harman offers quotes from the anthropologist, Richard Lee who has this to say on the matter:

“Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations. P3

I clearly recall a first hand experience of this common ownership when as a youth I encountered a down-on-his-luck, drunken aborigine on the outskirts of Cooper Pedy, an outback Australian opal mining settlement. The old fella begged for a cigarette and my travelling companion duly obliged. In fact he gave him the whole packet and wished him well. I thought that was the end of the matter. Not so. Some hours later, a group of young aboriginal men arrived and offered to feed us back at their camp. It transpired that the old, drunken man that we had shown a little civility to was, in fact, a tribal elder, and because we had shared our stuff with him then we were now part of the tribe and therefore entitled to share all that the tribe had to offer. All property it seemed, was communal. It was my first and only experience of primitive communism and that magical experience has stayed with me ever since.

To substantiate this very point, Harman offers a further quote from Lee’s Reflections on Primitive Communism:

It is the long experience of egalitarian sharing that has moulded our past. Despite our seeming adaptation to life in hierarchical societies, and despite the rather dismal track record of human rights in many parts of the world, there are signs that humankind retains a deep-rooted sense of egalitarianism, a deep-rooted commitment to the norm of reciprocity, a deep-rooted sense of community. P7

All of us can cite simple but revealing everyday examples of human cooperation, altruism, empathy and charity. They are in fact, too numerous to be anything but a clear indicator that we humans, all seven billion of us, survive best when we cooperate, despite what selfish trajectories our individual genes may be travelling in.