of the world are affirming compassion and the golden rule as fundamental principles that are integral to their faiths at the same time i think
to be done after that okay okay so quick natural history first compassion in the beginning there was compassion and i mean
not just when human beings first showed up but actually even before that i think it's probably the case that in the human evolutionary lineage even before
there were homo sapiens feelings like compassion and love and sympathy had earned their way kind of into the gene pool and biologists have a pretty clear idea of how this first happened
it happened through a principle known as kin selection and the basic idea of kin selection is that
if an animal feels compassion for a close relative and this compassion leads the animal to help the relative then in the end
the compassionactually winds up helping the genes underlying the compassion itself so from a biologist 's point of view
get there i hope to get a little fuzzier to me this isn't this doesn't bother me so much that the underlying darwinian rationale of compassion
is kind of self serving at the genetic level actually i think what the bad news is about kin selection is just that it means that this kind of compassion
is naturally deployed only within the family that's the bad news the good news is compassion is natural the bad news is that this kin selected compassion is naturally confined to the family
now there's more good news that came along later in evolution a second kind of evolutionary logic biologists call that reciprocal altruism okay and there the basic idea is that
compassion leads you to do good things for people who then will return the favor
again you know i know this is not as inspiring a notion of compassion as you may have heard in the past but from a biologist 's point of view this reciprocal altruism kind of compassion it is ultimately self serving too
you wind up most easily extending compassion to friends and allies i'm sure a lot of you if a close friend has something really terrible happen to them you feel really bad
the bad news is this doesn't bring us universalcompassion by itself okay so there's still work to be done now
okay it has given people a kind of intuitive appreciation of the golden rule okay i don't quite mean that the golden rule itself is written in our genes but you can go
to a hunter gatherer society that has had no exposure to any of the great religious traditions no exposure to ethical philosophy and you'll find if you spend time with these people that basically they believe that one good turn deserves another
and that bad deeds should be punished and evolutionary psychologists think that these intuitions have a basis in the genes
so they do understand that if you want to be treated well you treat other people well and it's good to treat other people well that's close to being
a kind of built in intuition so that's good news now if you've been paying attention you're probably anticipating that there's bad news here okay that we still aren't to universal love and it's true because
although an appreciation of the golden rule is natural it's also natural to kind of carve out exceptions to the golden rule okay i mean for example
none of us probably want to go to prison but we all think that there are some people who should go to prison right so we think we should treat them differently than we would want to be treated now we have a rationale for that we say they did these bad things
that make it just that they should go to prison none of us really extends the golden rule in truly diffuse and universal fashion we have the capacity to carve out exceptions put people in a special category and the problem
in everyday life the way we all make these decisions about who we're not going to extend the golden rule to we use a much rougher and readier formula and basically it's just like if you're my enemy if you're my rival
okay if you're not my friend if you're not in my family i'm much less inclined to apply the golden rule to you okay we all kind of do that
or some of them have done things that put them in a special category the israelis would not want to have an economic blockade imposed on them but they impose one on gaza and they say well
the palestinians or some of them have brought this on themselves so it's these exclusions to the golden rule that amount to a lot of the world 's trouble
and it's natural to do that so the fact that the golden rule is in some sense built in to us is not by itself going to bring us
are you on the edges of your seats here good because before i tell you about that good news i'm going to have to take a little excursion
it's this non zero sumness stuff you just heard a little bit about it's just quick introduction to game theory this won 't hurt
basically a zero sum game is the kind you're used to in sports where there's a winner and a loser so their fortunes add up to zero okay so in tennis
then the person on your side of the net is in a non zero sum relationship with you because every point is either good for both of you positive win win or bad for both of you it's lose lose okay that's a non zero sum
game and in real life there are lots of non zero sum games in the realm of economics say if you buy something that means you'd rather have the merchandise than the money
but the merchant would rather have the money than the merchandise you both feel you won okay in a war two allies are playing a non zero sum game it's going to either be win win or lose lose for them
so there are lots of non zero sum games in real life and you could basically
the deployment of the golden rule most naturally happens along these non zero sum channels so kind of webs of non zero sumness are where you would expect compassion and the golden rule to kind of work their magic
with zero sum channels you would expect something else okay so now you're ready for the good news that i said might save the world and now i can admit that it might not too now that i've held your attention for three minutes of
you can go back all the way to the stone age and i think from technological evolution
roads the wheel writing a lot of transportation and communication technologies have just inexorably made it
so that more people can be in more non zero sum relationships with more and more people at greater and greater distances okay that's kind of the story
of civilization it's why social organization has grown from the hunter gatherer village to the ancient state the empire now here we are in a globalized world and the story of
you see this all the time in the modern world you saw it with the recent economic crash where bad things happen in the economy bad for everybody for much of the world good things happen it's good for
look at the depictions of japanese in the american media as just about subhuman and look at the fact that we dropped atomic bombs really without giving it much of a thought
and you compare that to the attitude now i think part of that is due to a kind of economic interdependence any form of interdependence non zero sum relationship forces you to acknowledge the humanity
of people so i think that's good and the world is full of non zero sum dynamics environmental problems in many ways put us all in the same boat
and there are non zero sum relationships that maybe people aren't aware of okay so for example
because if these muslims become happier and happier with their place in the world and feel that they have a place in it that's good for americans because there will be fewer terrorists to threaten american security if they get less and less happy that will be bad for americans okay so there's
plenty of non zero sumness and so the question is if there's so much non zero sumness
a couple of things are that first of all there are a lot of zero sum situations in the world and also you know sometimes again people don't recognize
the non zero sum dynamics in the world and i think in both of these areas i think
you know economic engagement is generally better than blockades and so on i think in this regard and politicians can be aware and should be aware
that when people around the world are looking at them are looking at their nation okay and picking up their cues
for whether they are in a zero sum or a non zero sum relationship with a nation like say america or any other nation human psychology is such that they use cues like do we feel we're being respected
because you know historically if you're not being respected you're probably not going to wind up in a non zero sum mutually profitablerelationship with people so we need to be aware
what kind of signals we're sending out and some of this again is in the realm of kind of political work if there's one thing i can encourageeveryone to do politicians religious leaders and us
it would be what i call expanding the moral imagination okay that is to say that your ability to put yourself
in the shoes of people in very different circumstances this is not the same as compassion but it's conducive to compassion it opens the channels
for compassion and i'm afraid here we have another good news bad news story which is that the moral imagination is part of human nature that's good
but again we tend to deploy it selectively okay once we define somebody as an enemy we have trouble putting ourselves in their shoes just naturally
so if you want to take a particularly hard case say for an american somebody in iran who 's burning an american flag say and you see them on tv well
you know they'll resist that comparison and that's natural that's human and similarly the person in iran when you try to humanize somebody in america who said
evil they'll have trouble with that okay so it's a very difficult thing to get people to expand the moral imagination to a place it doesn't naturally go i think it's worth the trouble because
i mean religious leaders are kind of in the inspiration business it's their great calling right now to get people all around the world better at expanding their moral imaginations appreciating
that in so many ways they're in the same boat i would just sum up the way things look at least from this secular perspective
as far as compassion and the golden rule go by saying that it's good news that compassion and the golden rule are in some sense
built in to human nature it's unfortunate that they tend to be selectively deployed
it's going to take real work to change that but nobody ever said that doing god 's work was going to be easy thanks
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