Tag: economics

Consumerism and spirituality

 

There is a popular meme in the new spirituality movement according to which we are destroying the planet due to an unspiritual desire for more and more goods, often driven by an ego need for status. If we were to live more simply, the argument goes, we wouldn’t have all these problems. So shift consciousness in this direction and there you have your solution.

I need to blow a few holes in this beguilingly appealing theory. It may well of course be true in the aggregate that we are consuming resources at an unsustainable rate, as it certainly is true that we in the developed countries are incentivising people who are not yet consuming resources at this unsustainable rate (and there are fewer and fewer of them) to start doing so in order to create markets for our stuff (in other words, to get hold of their stuff in order that we can have even more stuff, because otherwise they would have no money with which to pay us).

Nevertheless I do not think this has much to do with status, it is essentially driven by a desire to enjoy life. Holidays, good food, comfortable accommodation, education, transport, culture, nightlife and similar major expenditure items in the budgets of households in developed countries dwarf the contribution of goods like personal electronics and discretionary luxury spending on cars and clothing. The idea that the demand for any of this first class of consumables, which is dominated by spending on services, is to any appreciable extent motivated by a desire simply to impress others I personally find extremely strange and at best highly anachronistic. For items like healthcare and related services such a hypothesis is even more outlandish.

So no, there is no excessive ego component in the demand function for most discretionary expenditure in developed countries and my hypothesis is that spiritual growth is going to have little to no impact on the demand side of the macroeconomy. It might be that some people adopt a radically different lifestyle which really impacts macrodemand, but most people are simply going to consume differently, or the mechanism of reduction in macrodemand is going to be a consequence of decisions which impact earnings thereby strengthening budget constraints, rather than any enlightened attitude to consumption. But the capitalist system will find its workers; as mechanization plays an ever greater role it does not need many of them and it will not struggle to seduce those it does. Changing attitudes to consumption will affect the structure of demand, as we already see, but not its overall level.

By castigating consumer behavior, we are really missing the target; we are failing to think in systems terms. What we really need is political action on inequality; we need to catalyse innovation and empower people rather than reducing vast masses of the population to this peculiarly post-modern form of serfdom in which the product of their labor is not even really needed, but simply exacted in order to obtain acquiescence to a political and economic order which serves the interests of a small elite which is no longer constrained even by the need to create social value. In this way, it can be obtained that the dominated classes pay ever more to obtain ever less, thereby maintaining and extenuating disparities and reconciling the system to its increasing inability to produce net wealth. By imagining the problem to be ourselves, and more specifically our own consumer behavior, we merely disempower ourselves by generating guilt. This discourse does not undermine the capitalist order as it presently functions, but concords with it.

In other words, we will not be free as long as the system is in place and there remain persons unscrupulous enough, or simply unenlightened enough, to operate it. Nothing will happen unless we take power into our own hands.

Luckily, in democratic countries, we still have some reasonable prospect of doing so even if the odds may be stacked against it. We need to seize this opportunity through social and political engagement, cultivating righteous anger and not merely organic cabbage. We need economic growth, even if we may need to define, frame and measure it differently, because it is synonymous with the liberation of creative energies that are today enslaved. The call to live within our means becomes too easily a call to acquiescence in the present disastrous order of things in which it matters little what people think or say, because money is in charge, not us.

I do not dispute that there is great spiritual value in cultivating simplicity and in doing our part to send the right price signals to the economy by buying what has intrinsic value rather than what does not. Nevertheless, our very ability to buy anything at all depends on a system which is not only inherently unjust but also tremendously inefficient. Under the paradigm of austerity, reducing personal consumption has become an accommodation to this system, in most cases involuntary: not a revolutionary act against it.

Consumerism and entitlement

Like many of my fellow earthlings, I am asphyxiated by the perillously thin air that passes today for social intercourse. I am sick of a society which flaunts its technological prowess and has not even the beginnings of a notion of what constitutes a good life. And I am sick of attitudes which are antithetical to the most basic human values, to the innate sense of what it is to be human. The society I live in is on a crash course towards self-destruction.

I do not conceive of myself in society as a one-man business, providing material and spiritual benefits in return for eking out an emotional existence. I am not a beggar. I am abundant.

Unlike many people I encounter on the “spiritual” path, I do not object per se to the existence of an economic system with property rights, labor relations and currency. These are all very strange concepts, totally alien to our human nature, but they make a world possible in which there is reasonable physical security and material well-being. I am willing, in short, to play the game, and even to defend the game. A society organized on tribal principles isn’t going to be sufficient given the level of global interdependency and complexity required to sustain ten billion human beings on this planet.

However, this doesn’t change who I am or what I aspire to; it doesn’t change that the economic system should be at the service of humanity, not at the service of itself. In fact, it does not change the fact that the entire edifice which we call the “economic system” would not work for five minutes if it really had to function in the way it is imagined to work by materialist utilitarians. Our human nature is not an inconvenient maladaptation to economic reality: it is its basis as well as its raison d’etre.

The rampant power of the creed of self-interest is intensely depressing. It has turned us all into social zombies, unable to think about any situation in life, even the most intimate, in terms other than “what’s in it for me?” It has cut us off from all other strategies than manipulation to get what we need, from the very ability to perceive other human beings as incarnate entities preceding their casual and casuistic attributes. This cancerous religion of self-interest is the true, most fundamental incarnation of evil in our midst. Around me, all I see is entitlement, cynicism, an attitude in which people are disposable, in which everyone is training for their black belt in manipulating everyone else and no-one has the sense to call time on the insanity. Where I am required to frame my every gesture as the first move in a commercial transaction in which I will be, experience shows, invariably outsmarted by a more talented bargainer.

Human life, human relationships, are sacred. But we are so degenerate, such sleepwalking machines, that none of us has any idea any more of what this means.

Property, debt and the money supply

I have just finished reading David Graeber’s book “Debt: The First 5000 Years“. It is somewhat relevant to our topic here, and in any case it is interesting, so let me summarize it and give a brief review.

In the first part of the book, Graeber, who is an anthropologist, takes to task the traditional notion of economics whereby cash was invented to reduce the transaction costs inherent in a system of barter. I am not sure how original his thesis is, but it is persuasive. In a nutshell, Graeber says that we know very well this is not true. In fact, the ability of cash to serve as a general means of engaging in daily economic transactions is no earlier than the 19th century and even postdates Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Apparently he knew this very well. Graeber says that Smith’s notion of the relationship between salaried worker and capitalist employer is not descriptive at all, but prescriptive, indeed utopian. In traditional societies, and Graeber quotes many examples, cash, when it exists, serves ceremonial, not transactional purposes. Rather, everyday transactions are carried out on credit.

Credit may mean a number of things. It may simply be a general expectation of reciprocity over time, which indeed may not even presuppose a predisposition to think in terms of personal or kin benefit at all (as per E.O.Wilson’s theory of multilevel selection). I have argued elsewhere that the role of emotions and empathy, and more particularly of shame, is to be understood against this background. On the other hand, in more complex societies, especially against the backdrop of taxation, as well as the standardization of weights and measures, credit becomes a matter of accounting records and ultimately transferable bearer instruments. Credit in this case can be standardized in terms of a commodity unit of account, even if the commodity itself is not exchanged. Official tables of correspondance between one commodity and another can also be promulgated by state authorities. Graeber argues that this antedates coinage, and a fortiori the general use of coinage, by a considerable margin. Thus the story of money is the story of debt.

This account occupies the first four chapters. As of chapter five, the book for me starts to come apart. In that chapter, Graeber attempts a moral philosophy of debt, but is clearly out of his depth in doing so. There are interesting elements in relation to slavery in chapters six and seven, but the point Graeber is trying to make is never clear. The rest of the book attempts a world history of money, and is disappointing. There is an omnipresent ideological underpinning to what Graeber says, and a disappointing lack of critical distance vis-a-vis the international financial economy. Regardless of its origins, one would have wanted an account which assessed its strengths and weaknesses in terms of serving the well-being of the human race today. Possibly even some thought-through proposals for change. Graeber is a long way from rising to this challenge; so much so that one is left wondering what the point in fact was of the analysis of slavery and of the moral nature of debt which he belabors.

That the book was going to fail in any such enterprise was for me obvious already from the title. Why 5000 years? Graeber argues that everything started, or at least starting going wrong, with the first agrarian empires. It is not at all clear why the fact of empire (however it is defined) is relevant. Humankind has been organizing itself into agriculturally based communities for at least twice this period. Such communities enabled community size to exceed the tribal unit for which our brain seems preprogrammed (known as Dunbar’s number). Once this happened, hierarchy and specialization became possible, property become a key issue, and it was no longer possible to keep track of a network of implied reciprocal obligations. There is every reason to date the development of formal credit systems, guaranteed by a central authority, to this date, rather than arbitrarily to begin at the dawn of written records.

Why does Graeber make what seems such an obvious mistake? In one sense, it is not of particular importance to his thesis. But there is, I think, a deeper reason. Graeber seeks to promulgate a romantic notion of the “human economy” in primitive societies (although he protests he does not). A “human economy” is an “economic system primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction and rearranging of human beings”. Logically, one supposes that “human economies” evolved, under the force of state formation (“empires”), into credit economies. Ignoring the fact that the purpose of the latter is hardly, per se, “the accumulation of wealth”, what type of society would be expected to be characterized by a “human economy”?

Graeber does not answer this question, but the examples he gives concern both hunter-gatherer and sedentary populations. And therein lies the rub, for these are organized on fundamentally different principles, and their economic systems reflect this.

Graeber says of this type of economy that “some are quite humane, others extraordinarily brutal”. Since, however, it is his own argument that the means of exchange relates directly to the exercise of violence, he should be more attentive to this distinction. In fact, what he misses is quite as basic as what Smith misses also. In the sedentary populations, property and intra-group violence have already arisen; and both credit and currency are used in a way which intrinsically recognizes and reinforces this, whatever their form and regardless of the keeping of written records. Graeber is blind to this because he accepts uncritically the monogamy myth, failing to see it as a primal form of violence, and this despite the rich variety in the sexual organization of the societies he mentions. He fails to see that monogamy is an outgrowth of property systems and not intrinsic to the human condition.

This matters, because human economies, according to his own definition, are about “organizing” human beings. Later, this means slaves. Before this, it means women in reproductive age. It is because property rights are already asserted by men over women that “human economies” have anything to ceremonially exchange. Absent this feature, the notion has no sense or raison d’etre.

Strangely enough, Graeber describes at length in his book rituals of exchange witnessed amongst Australian aborigines, whose social organization remained (or more probably returned to) one of hunter-gatherers. These economies therefore have a reasonable claim to incarnate principles which arose prior to “human economies”. And guess what: attitudes to sex are much more relaxed; indeed, sexual exchange plays a key part in the overall ritual of economic exchange between the tribal groups. In fact barter occurs in primitive societies only in an inter-group setting, and always within an overall context of socialization between the groups.

Rather than an inspiration for an economic theory truer to mankind’s basic nature, the “human economy” therefore seems to me to mark the beginning of where things went wrong. It would be hugely naive to appeal to such a model as a solution for the world’s economic woes.

Things certainly got for a long time worse before they started to get better. This, however, is no indictment of credit or currency as such. The behavioral assumptions of classical economics have been under attack for decades, and Graeber does contribute something. We are still lacking a better model. But the models of classical economies are perfectly good for most of the purposes to which they are put, and distinctly better than any guide to practical action which might emerge from Graeber’s views. We do not have to believe the myth of homo economicus, and we certainly do not have to accept the distribution of wealth and opportunity which history has bequeathed us. We can acknowledge the embedded violence in the economic system as it exists, and still use the science to improve the happiness of human beings – which is its foremost goal.

 

On the economics of therapy

The basic elements of effective personal development: bodywork, meditation and support.

In conceiving ones pathway to personal growth and healing, I think it is important to have a proper understanding of the processes involved, an understanding which is frequently lacking.

In a few words, my understanding is as follows. Within the bodymind there are two processes, both of which are needed because they depend on and reinforce each other and the end result is a product of the two. These can be characterized as a feminine and a masculine process. The feminine process involves softening of internal obstacles to the flow of energy, whether these be biophysical obstacles such as muscular hypertonicity or psychic obstacles in the form of existing representations at the conscious or subconscious level – such as the idea that certain behavior is wrong, that one should conform to certain norms, and so on. The masculine process involves increasing the quantitative level of life energy in the body so that these obstacles come under pressure from within, eventually leading to their crumbling or collapse. In terms of this masculine process there is no distinction between the body and the mind.

A simple physical model of this is as follows. We can think of water behind a dam, the release of which can be achieved both by weakening the structure of the dam and by increasing the weight of water bearing down upon it. Or we can think of the process of birth, where hormonal secretions soften the cervix which then opens under the weight of the embryo and the uterine contractions which increase the pressure applied to it.

As energy starts to flow, the process becomes self-reinforcing. We can think of water which, denied its route of least resistance, its natural pathway of flow, by the presence of the dam finds other pathways to bring rainfall to the sea. As the dam weakens, more and more of the rainfall will recommence flowing through its natural channel to the detriment of the diverted routes which had been previously established (this process of diversion is called in Freudian terms displacement).

Our bodies and our minds are always trying to rebuild the dams which we through our therapeutic endeavors wish to weaken. Many factors keep these dams in place. However, all of these factors are themselves due to displacement, because damming vital energy on a long term basis is not natural. (We can indeed restrain our vital energy over the short term by natural processes, under the force of the Reality Principle whereby expression is put off when its immediate expression would have negative consequences. We will also naturally channel that energy in different directions, partly by conscious choice and partly prompted by emotions, so that for example the energy is available to respond to a threat. This ability to control the flow of energy constitutes the biological basis for what is expressed pathologically in neurosis.)

It follows from this that there is always a weakest link in the line of defenses keeping the dams in place. This is the easiest and possibly only route to circumventing the process whereby the body heals breaches in its psychological defenses, and indeed builds stronger defenses if necessary. A direct confrontation of the front line of defense is quite counterproductive, but it may happen that when the underlying restorative mechanisms are weakened sufficiently, the whole edifice is at some point swept away.

At the deepest level, these mechanisms are representational. It is because we believe certain incorrect things about the world that we build inappropriate defenses. Only when we build new representations to replace these beliefs will we stop supplying the neurosis with the energy it needs to resist the energy naturally brought to bear on it by life processes.

All of this implies, I think, that we need to integrate two tracks in our work on ourselves.

Bodywork increases the quantitative level of energy in the body and corresponds to the masculine part of the process. All types of bodywork can help, but the most effective will be that which builds energy and allows it to circulate in the core life centers of the body, namely the pelvis where sexual energy is generated and which is at the crossroads of the flow of energy in the body and therefore the position which most naturally acts as a bottleneck.

Of course by bodywork I do not mean simply any physical practice. The practice must be appropriate, grounded and conscious to avoid being merely a vehicle to reinforce existing tensions. If it is not conscious, it will be manipulated by the mind to this end, or at least rendered inoperative.

The body will always reuse existing scripts if it can. Thus for example while a practice such as running may be marvellously energizing and, aside from its possible opportunity cost, is certainly not to be discouraged, it will not correct disequilibria in the body unless the body has really been deprived of this type of exercise before. Just as there are many ways to skin a cat, there are also many ways to run; the body is always going to use the method it already knows unless this method is not available to it. Thus if the physical movement relies disproportionately on certain muscle groups and inadequately on others, it will continue to do so because this is a perfectly viable, even if not the most natural, way to perform the task in question.

This means that running may be helpful, and there is no doubt that in principle it can lead to increased blood flow in the pelvis, but it is certainly not going directly to the heart of the problem. In order to do this you need to invite your body to do things which, while natural (if perhaps exaggerated for therapeutic purposes), it is not used to doing and therefore has no readily available script to deal with. Consciousness in this process helps to construct new neural pathways which can progressively replace, or remove the excessive strain on, the old.

Whilst bodywork is therefore an indispensable part of an effective therapeutic process, it is important to understand that it is really not adequate alone. I do not believe that bodywork is going to reprogram, in any reasonable span of time, representations in the psyche. Only the psyche itself can do this and in order to do so it needs to be exposed to a reality which is inconsistent with its prior assumptions, in a way which is safe enough to allow it to relax into the invitation which this situation provides to experience new ways of seeing the world.

This is, at a very general level, and as properly understood, the role of meditation. The choice of meditation is, however, hardly to be left to chance. Meditations should be, to a large degree, sexual and embodied. This is for the simple reason that the faulty representations are, to a large degree, sexual and disembodied. Where faulty representations are not directly sexual in nature, they are still sexual at a secondary level. Thus for example we may have a faulty representation of threats to our physical integrity, but as a result of this faulty representation a degree of sexual stasis has also resulted. Moreover, all such representations result in avoidance of behavior which sexual expression calls for, namely contact, intimacy, empathy and so on. I shall have more to say on this in a future post.

Again, both the problem and its solution are fairly easy to understand. We all know that if we are afraid of something in particular we will normally be able to overcome that fear by approaching the situation and becoming familiar with it, until we realize that our fear was not justified. If necessary, we start with baby steps or we take an indirect route. But eventually we become comfortable in the situation we had feared. Progressively, we change the internal representation that we have of the world, and the old one disappears.

To take a trivial (if for me painful) example, I for a long time was afraid to urinate with someone watching. This impeded my ability to use public urinals and was beyond my conscious power to change. This type of blockage is only going to be released by actually engaging in the activity in question under circumstances which are safe enough to relax and drop the subconscious conditioning at the root of the problem. Even if we frequently avoid doing so, it really is very easy in principle. You just find someone you trust, name the problem (by itself an important step), and ask them if they would be willing to observe you urinating. If it is too hard for you, you could ask them to start by watching from behind a curtain, or using a webcam, or merely be present while looking the other way, or whatever you can think of that is sufficiently below the blocking pain threshold not to activate the unwanted reflex. And you take it from there. To actually do this encounters some psychological resistance, but it is not really difficult if you want to.

This is where the methods of tantra come in. These methods may seem physical, and you may even be tempted to label them bodywork (correctly, of course, for a part of the methods). Yet these methods are really working on our false representations of the world in order to replace them with more flexible psychic structures which allow us to experience the world naturally, whilst still safely, especially in the dimension of sexuality and intimacy. Experience of the world as it really is naturally builds trust in our instinctive nature, because we see that this nature is in fact consistent with possibilities in the outside world, and not, as we had always supposed, inconsistent. This recreates the bridge, which in fact becomes an increasingly permeable membrane, between our inner world and the outer world, so that we can recognize these as two aspects of the same reality and move between them fluidly. In this way we have an embodied presence in the world, and not a disembodied antagonism to it. Our needs for intimacy are met and we become increasingly confident that they will always be met. From this reestablishment of trust is borne compassion.

Therefore I think it is really important to recognize and acknowledge ones needs and blockages in relation to sex and intimacy and of course not to hurtle in to situations which may be retraumatizing, but to find a way back to this source of ones being.

In this process, an exclusive preference for bodywork, which I encounter not infrequently, reveals enduring resistance to psychic change and only underlines the need for a complementary approach targeting the heart, emotions and senses. Bodywork is psychologically easy because it typically confronts nothing in ones relation to the other. It is an individual practice. Meditation can only be relational in nature, because psychic representations are relational in nature. Psychic representations, unlike physical representations, do not concern the organization of our body in its physical autonomy, but rather how we relate to others around us. This framework is largely a sovereign abstraction of the mind. It has some use in regard to real threats, but is dysfunctional in relation to imaginary threats. If we wish to change it, we need to allow ourselves to perceive their imaginary nature and reestablish the trust which we have lost.

As we move, of course, along this path, psychic material which underpins these representations may surface, together with the corresponding emotions (i.e. the affect). I am not trying to suggest that it is easy (or even appropriate) simply to plough ahead at such moments. Special talents are needed to help people safely and quickly through these occurrences. It is important to understand that there is not, as such, any psychic danger from this happening, at least in the vast majority of cases which are short of psychiatric in nature. It is only a question of the rate at which one makes progress, because these are critical moments in which either breakthroughs can be achieved or, conversely, one can slip back and have to start again (not of course from scratch, but the material will recede into the subconscious and this is evidence that it has not been processed and continues to affect the psyche). Whence the benefit of an experienced facilitator, coach or therapist.

So that’s the recipe: conscious bodywork (including breathwork), embodied and sexual meditation (once this type of meditation has reached its goal it can be replaced or complemented by others), plus ideally someone you can rely on to help you through the more challenging moments.

Good luck everyone 🙂

“Sex at Dawn” – a review

I have just finished reading Chris Ryan and Cacilda Jetha’s Sex at Dawn. The book is such a revelation that it is hard to know where to start. This is not only one of those books that will change your life. It’s going to change a whole lot else too.

The experience one has reading it is much akin to the one I had five years ago when I attended my first tantra workshop. A whole load of stuff that previously existed as isolated islands, unconnected, suppressed or misunderstood, suddenly falls into place – in this case not only things I have felt inside, but numerous aspects of the contemporary world as well. Reading the book launches me into filling in many of the gaps it leaves open, as well – something I will no doubt be doing over the next series of posts.

For those who don’t know, the books central thesis is that humankind evolved as a group-living, cooperative species in which sexuality was shared and played an important social role in building and maintaining group ties.

I am totally convinced. Not just by their breadth of argument, though it is impressive. Above all, it just. makes. sense.

There are enough summaries of the book elsewhere, from every conceivable viewpoint, so I won’t attempt another (though I would advise you to read it yourself). In this post, I want to try to qualify the book and give a preliminary assessment of its importance.

Although basing itself widely on earlier work and despite its conversational tone – which heaps ridicule on conventional thought – this is a book which is likely to be as fundamental to humankind’s self-understanding as was Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. In a way, it is a completion of Darwin’s thought. The voyage of self-discovery on which Darwin launched our species has now come into port; and whilst there is surely much still to be discovered and said and plenty of meat to put on the bones, the essential features of that destination are now known.

Coming to terms with them under the conditions of modern life is going to be more of a challenge. In the first place, Ryan’s and Jetha’s conclusions are going to be subject to a bitter rearguard action. Far too many vested interests, many of them household names, are going to find it difficult to climb down from the positions they have taken; and especially when assailed with so little pity. Such vested interests are not only in academia of course, but across the spectrum of society. It looks to me like we are in for the last, and I fear not universally peaceful act in the culture wars which started with Copernicus and Galileo.

It’s time to take sides in those culture wars, or as the authors challenge us in their closing chapter, very aptly, to “come out”. If you recognize yourself as a member of the species they describe, now is the time to say it. Subgroups defined on the basis of sexual orientation or preferences have fought numerous partial wars in the past (and go on, of course, doing so today). Now, though, we have an overarching label for all these struggles: human being. We should, and will likely need to, combine our forces.

What else is new? Closest to the epicenter, is the need to reevaluate love and its associated emotions. I want to say more on this in a future article because it is where I find the book most liberating and hopeful. Then, of course, there is the need to reevaluate and reimagine social institutions suited to the “sexual exiles” we now know we are (to use a term coined by Stephen Snyder, featured in an earlier post). This is already an agenda of unimaginable breadth – but it does not stop there. As an economist (yes, I am in reality an economist), I find an enormous set of related challenges in the need to reassess the fundamental and highly useful simplifying assumptions of mainstream economics regarding so-called “rational” behavior. Of course, this is not an entirely new agenda; but it is lent a great deal new weight by these insights into a model of human nature quite at odds, at least within a defined sphere, with neoclassical assumptions. The use of the term “households” to define the basic unit of consumption was already a (reluctant and awkward) concession to the commonsense understanding that there existed individuals within the boundaries of the welfare-maximizing economic unit other than its (presumably) titular head, whose welfare was part of the objective function that this “head” would endeavor to maximize (we are not told with what discount factor). Now, I think, we know that we are capable of being cynical – but not wired for it. Whatever the exact form is that such “wiring” takes. (This is a matter I have frankly no understanding of – if anyone can enlighten me).

In fact it is difficult to conceive of any area of the social sciences which will not now have to question its basic assumptions – from anthropology to (even) psychoanalysis: how do Oedipus and Elektra complexes look once we redefine the family unit?.  (A problem with the standard discourse of psychoanalysis which has always, of course, been quite a challenge to adequately theorize).

What Ryan and Jetha have achieved is what is correctly known as a paradigm shift. The course which human history is about to take has been set out by the seminal philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. It will not be easy and it may not be nice: but there is no turning back until, eventually, the fact of our polyamorous ancestry is as much a part of our mental universe as the theory of evolution itself.

It’s my hope, of course, that in the inevitable onslaughts which will follow, the fundamentally beautiful human insights which follow from the book’s findings will not be lost from view. This is no crude defence of marginal sexual lifestyles. We are all a part of it, and all estranged from our core natures by no fault of our own. This calls for courage and conviction, but also empathy and compassion. Something, it turns out, we as a species are actually quite capable of.