Tomgram: Rick Shenkman, How We Learned to Stop Worrying About People and
Love the Bombing
By Rick Shenkman
Posted on January 10, 2016, Printed on January 10, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176088/ ;
Torturers, rapists, murderers: for more than a decade as I researched my
history of the Vietnam War, Kill Anything That Moves, I spent a good deal of
time talking to them, thinking about them, reading about them, writing about
them. They all had much in common. At a relatively young age, these men had
traveled thousands of miles to kill people they didn't know on the say-so of
men they didn't know, and for a mere pittance -- all of it done in the name
of America.
I also spent time talking to another group of men, a much larger contingent
who stood by and watched as those beside them tortured or raped or murdered.
Some heartily endorsed these acts, some seemed ambivalent about them, some
were appalled by them, but none did much of anything about them.
Then there was a third contingent of men: those who witnessed the torture,
rapes, or murders and couldn't -- wouldn't -- abide by that conduct. This
tiny group spoke out about what they had seen, often at the risk of their
own welfare, sometimes their very lives.
What differentiated these men from each other? They had all been raised in
the same country, had been subject to the same laws and norms, including
prohibitions against torture, rape, and murder. Many, if not most, had grown
up in similar socio-economic circumstances, received comparable educations,
and at least nominally belonged to churches with strict moral codes and an
emphasis on doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Why then
did so many of them commit horrendous acts or stand by while others did? Why
did so few speak up?
I never came up with satisfactory answers to these questions. What I learned
instead was that almost any man might be a torturer or a rapist or a
murderer if given the chance. I learned that most men will look the other
way if at all possible. And I learned that shockingly few men are capable of
the courage and the empathy necessary to stand up for those that their
brothers-in-arms would just as soon kill.
Today, Rick Shenkman -- head honcho at the History News Network and author
of the just-published Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the
Way of Smart Politics -- explores the biological phenomena that may well
underpin our appalling lack of empathy, the animal instincts that allow so
many of us to stand by in the face of unspeakable acts. While the science
may still be in its early stages and the means of measuring our motivations
still crude and inexact, Shenkman (whose new book Scientific American calls
"a timely look into psychological patterns that drive political behavior")
analyzes a raft of studies that offer new ways of thinking about why so many
humans tend to be so utterly inhumane, and explores how the stories we tell
ourselves and others might offer us a path to overcome our utterly human
inhumanity. Nick Turse
Ted Cruz's Stone-Age Brain and Yours
Why "Collateral Damage" Elicits So Little Empathy Among Americans
By Rick Shenkman
After Senator Ted Cruz suggested that the United States begin carpet bombing
Islamic State (IS) forces in Syria, the reaction was swift. Hillary Clinton
mocked candidates who use "bluster and bigotry." Jeb Bush insisted the idea
was "foolish." Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, tweeted: "You
can't carpet bomb an insurgency out of existence. This is just silly."
When CNN's Wolf Blitzer objected that Cruz's proposal would lead to lots of
civilian casualties, the senator retorted somewhat incoherently: "You would
carpet bomb where ISIS is -- not a city, but the location of the troops. You
use air power directed -- and you have embedded special forces to direction
the air power. But the object isn't to level a city. The object is to kill
the ISIS terrorists." PolitiFact drily noted that Cruz apparently didn't
understand what the process of carpet (or "saturation") bombing entails. By
definition, it means bombing a wide area regardless of the human cost.
By almost any standard Cruz's proposal was laughable and his rivals and the
media called him on it. What happened next? By all rights after such a
mixture of inanity and ruthlessness, not to say bloody-mindedness against
civilian populations, his poll numbers should have begun to sag. After all,
he'd just flunked the commander-in-chief test and what might have seemed
like a test of his humanity as well. In fact, his poll numbers actually
crept up. The week before the imbroglio, an ABC opinion poll had registered
him at 15% nationally. By the following week, he was up to 18% and one poll
even had him at a resounding 24%.
How to explain this? While many factors can affect a candidate's polling
numbers, one uncomfortable conclusion can't be overlooked when it comes to
reactions to Cruz's comments: by and large, Americans don't think or care
much about the real-world consequences of the unleashing of American air
power or that of our allies. The other day, Human Rights Watch (HRW)
reported that, in September and October, a Saudi Arabian coalition backed by
the United States "carried out at least six apparently unlawful airstrikes
in residential areas of the [Yemeni] capital," Sana'a. The attacks resulted
in the deaths of 60 civilians. Just about no one in the United States took
notice, nor was it given significant media coverage. More than likely, this
is the first time you've heard about the HRW findings.
You might think that this is because the conflict in Yemen is off our
national radar screen. But how much attention have Americans paid to U.S.
air strikes and bombing runs in Iraq? Washington has literally been bombing
Iraq on and off for twelve years and yet few have taken much notice. That
helps explain why bombing is such an attractive option for Washington any
time trouble breaks out in the world. Americans don't seem to care much
what goes on when our bombs or missiles hit the ground. As pollsters found
recently, a surprising number of Americans even want to bomb places that
can't be found on a map. When Public Policy Polling asked GOP voters in
mid-December if they favored bombing Agrabah, 30% said they did (as did 19%
of Democrats), while only 13% opposed the idea. Agrabah is the fictional
city featured in the Disney movie Aladdin.
Would you support or oppose bombing Agrabah?
Support bombing Agrabah.......... 30%
Oppose bombing Agrabah......... 13%
Not sure................... 57%
That 57% were "not sure" might be considered at least modestly (but not
wildly) reassuring.
Why Cruz's Numbers Went Up
History suggests that this blanket bloodthirstiness or at least lack of
empathy for those on the other end of America's bombing campaigns isn't new.
In March 1951, nine months into the Korean War, Freda Kirchwey, a crusading
liberal journalist at the Nation, expressed bewilderment at American
indifference to the fate of Korean civilians killed by our bombs. The
destruction was awful. Little was left standing, structurally speaking, in
North Korea. Nothing, she complained in a column, "excuses the terrible
shambles created up and down the Korean peninsula by the American-led
forces, by American planes raining down napalm and fire bombs, and by heavy
land and naval artillery." And yet few seemed bothered by it.
Because she was an optimist Kirchwey expressed the hope that Americans would
eventually come to share her own moral anguish at what was being done in
their name. They never did. If anything, the longer the war ground on, the
less Americans seemed interested in the fate of the victims of our bombing.
Why did they show so little empathy? Science helps provide us with an
answer and it's a disturbing one: empathy grows harder as distances --
whether of status, geography, or both -- increase. Think of it as a matter
of our Stone Age brains. It's hard because in many circumstances an
empathic response is, in fact, an unnatural act. It is not natural, it
turns out, for us to feel empathy for those who look different and speak a
different language. It is not natural for us to empathize with those who
are invisible to us, as most bombing victims were and are. Nor is it
natural for us to feel empathy for people who have what social scientists
call "low status" in our eyes, as did the Korean peasants we were killing.
Recent studies show that, faced with a choice of killing a single individual
to save the lives of several people, we are far more apt to consider doing
it if the individual we are sacrificing is of such low status. When subjects
in an experiment are told that high-status people are being saved, the
number willing to let the low-status victim die actually increases.
Another social science finding helps us understand why empathy is often in
short supply and why Ted Cruz is capable of cavalierly recommending we
carpet bomb Syrians living under the control of the Islamic State. Once we
have convinced ourselves of the necessity and correctness of bombing the
hell out of a country -- as Americans did during the Korean War and as we
are now doing in our war against IS -- the wiring in our Stone Age brain
helps us overcome any hint of guilt we might be inclined to feel over the
ensuing loss of life. It quite naturally acts to dehumanize the distant
victims of our air strikes.
This is a classic case of cognitive dissonance. Our brain hates to feel torn
between conflicting emotions. Instead it rationalizes doing what we want to
do by discounting any feeling that gives rise to negative emotions, in this
case, guilt. An extreme example of this was what happened when the Nazis
decided to stigmatize Jews and later wipe them out. From the moment they
began their ruthless anti-Semitic campaigns, they used hideous imagery to
convince other Germans that Jews were not, like them, human at all, but
little different than rats. It is, of course, far easier to kill someone,
or to sit by while others do the same, if you dehumanize them first. Rather
than feeling empathy for the downtrodden Jews, many Germans felt contempt
and disgust, strong emotions that swamped whatever other feelings they might
have had.
In a study a few years ago, researchers measured the activity in the brains
of subjects looking at pictures of homeless people. The finding was
shocking. Brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region of the
brain where empathy is often registered, was significantly lower than
normal. Put another way, the subjects in this experiment literally paid the
homeless no (or at least less) mind.
This may sound cruel and uncaring, but as far as biology is concerned it
makes sense. Our genes, as the biologist Richard Dawkins has taught us, are
"selfish"; they are, that is, built to enhance their own replication, which
is, in effect, their biological imperative. Caring for people who are low
in status, particularly those who belong to another tribe, doesn't serve
this imperative. Indeed, it may interfere with it by diverting the
attention of the host -- that's you and me -- from activities that will
enhance our survival.
Think of this as our Stone-Age brains in action. It's not that we
necessarily make a conscious decision to ignore the fate of people who are
low in status. Our brain does this automatically and seamlessly for us.
Out of conscious awareness it decides if someone is useful to us. If that
person is, our brain quickly achieves a state of hyper-attentiveness: our
nostrils flare, our eyes widen, and our ears tune in relevant sounds. Think
of what happens when you're in the presence of somebody important and you'll
know what I mean. If someone is deemed useless to us? Unless we're worried
that they hyperpose a threat, our brain tells our body to relax.
Because it is in our biological interest to feel empathy for people from our
own tribe and family -- those, that is, in a position to either enhance our
survival or perpetuate our genes -- we come equipped with mechanisms to help
us distinguish our people from outsiders. From the moment we're born, we
focus on those around us and bond with them. A mother and child know each
other through smell. Brother and sister recognize each other's familiar
facial features.
When we hear someone speaking a foreign language, we instinctively discount
their humanity. This was shown in a 2014 experiment designed to determine
if human beings were more willing to sacrifice someone who spoke a different
language in order to save the lives of several others. The findings were
clear-cut. Only 18% of the subjects in the experiment were willing to make
the cold calculation that saving the lives of several people at the cost of
one life was "fair" when the intended victim shared their native language.
However, that percent more than doubled when it was revealed that the person
to be sacrificed spoke a foreign language. The experiment's results
remained the same whether that language was Korean, Hebrew, Japanese,
English, or Spanish.
Why Stories Matter When It Comes to American War
You may be beginning to wonder if we aren't doomed to eternal indifference
to the human beings who suffer when we loose our Air Force on them, but
science offers us a modicum of hope on the subject. In recent years, one of
the strongest findings is that storytelling can break through our
indifference and foster empathy even for distant peoples who might otherwise
seem alien to us. This more than anything else gives us the ability to
empathize with those with whom we don't identify demographically or
otherwise. Stories hold our attention, while feeding the strong urge to find
meaningful patterns in human behavior.
As scientists have now demonstrated in experiments, the brain is a natural
pattern finder. It wants one and one to equal two. Mysterious may be the
will of God, but here on Earth we expect behavior to be explicable. Stories
are designed to establish cause and effect, and once we understand what
motivates people we can usually find a way to empathize with them.
Stories connect us to people in a way nothing else can. It's the reason
politicians regularly tell stories on the campaign trail. Years ago,
Harvard social scientist Howard Gardner set out to discover what highly
successful leaders have in common. After reviewing the lives of 11
luminaries, from Margaret Thatcher to Martin Luther King, Jr., he concluded
that their success depended to a remarkable extent on their ability to
communicate a compelling story or, as he put it, "narratives that help
individuals think about and feel who they are, where they come from, and
where they are headed." These stories, he found, "constitute the single
most powerful weapon in the leader's literary arsenal."
When people are reduced to numbers -- as were the civilian victims of air
power during the Korean War and as are the civilians who become "collateral
damage" in American air strikes in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere -- we don't
feel their pain, nor do we automatically put ourselves in their shoes, which
is by definition what you do when you are feeling empathic. We have the
bomber pilot's syndrome. We don't feel anything for the victims below.
This is one reason why antiwar movements matter. They tell stories about
the victims of war. It was striking in the Vietnam years, for instance, how
many Americans came to care for, say, a small naked Vietnamese girl napalmed
near her village, or so many other Vietnamese civilians who suffered under a
rain of American bombs, rockets, napalm, and artillery shells. The stories
that the massive antiwar movement regularly told here about the distant
world being decimated by the U.S. war machine created a powerful sense of
empathy among many, including active-duty American soldiers and veterans of
the war, for the plight of the Vietnamese. (It helped that few Americans
believed that North Vietnam posed an existential threat to the United
States. Fear brings out the worst in us.)
Storytelling happens to be in every human's toolkit. We are all born
storytellers and attentive listeners. Biology may incline us to turn a cold
eye on the suffering of people we can't see and don't know, but stories can
liberate us. Ted Cruz may be able to build up his poll numbers by promising
to carpet bomb foreigners in the Middle East of whom we are fearful, but at
least we know that biology doesn't have to dictate our response. Our brains
don't have to stay in the Stone Age. Stories can change us, if we start
telling them.
Rick Shenkman is the editor and founder of the History News Network and the
author most recently of Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in
the Way of Smart Politics (Basic Books, January 2016).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Rick Shenkman
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176088
Tomgram: Rick Shenkman, How We Learned to Stop Worrying About People and
Love the Bombing
By Rick Shenkman
Posted on January 10, 2016, Printed on January 10, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176088/ ;
Torturers, rapists, murderers: for more than a decade as I researched my
history of the Vietnam War, Kill Anything That Moves, I spent a good deal of
time talking to them, thinking about them, reading about them, writing about
them. They all had much in common. At a relatively young age, these men had
traveled thousands of miles to kill people they didn't know on the say-so of
men they didn't know, and for a mere pittance -- all of it done in the name
of America.
I also spent time talking to another group of men, a much larger contingent
who stood by and watched as those beside them tortured or raped or murdered.
Some heartily endorsed these acts, some seemed ambivalent about them, some
were appalled by them, but none did much of anything about them.
Then there was a third contingent of men: those who witnessed the torture,
rapes, or murders and couldn't -- wouldn't -- abide by that conduct. This
tiny group spoke out about what they had seen, often at the risk of their
own welfare, sometimes their very lives.
What differentiated these men from each other? They had all been raised in
the same country, had been subject to the same laws and norms, including
prohibitions against torture, rape, and murder. Many, if not most, had grown
up in similar socio-economic circumstances, received comparable educations,
and at least nominally belonged to churches with strict moral codes and an
emphasis on doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Why then
did so many of them commit horrendous acts or stand by while others did? Why
did so few speak up?
I never came up with satisfactory answers to these questions. What I learned
instead was that almost any man might be a torturer or a rapist or a
murderer if given the chance. I learned that most men will look the other
way if at all possible. And I learned that shockingly few men are capable of
the courage and the empathy necessary to stand up for those that their
brothers-in-arms would just as soon kill.
Today, Rick Shenkman -- head honcho at the History News Network and author
of the just-published Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the
Way of Smart Politics -- explores the biological phenomena that may well
underpin our appalling lack of empathy, the animal instincts that allow so
many of us to stand by in the face of unspeakable acts. While the science
may still be in its early stages and the means of measuring our motivations
still crude and inexact, Shenkman (whose new book Scientific American calls
"a timely look into psychological patterns that drive political behavior")
analyzes a raft of studies that offer new ways of thinking about why so many
humans tend to be so utterly inhumane, and explores how the stories we tell
ourselves and others might offer us a path to overcome our utterly human
inhumanity. Nick Turse
Ted Cruz's Stone-Age Brain and Yours
Why "Collateral Damage" Elicits So Little Empathy Among Americans
By Rick Shenkman
After Senator Ted Cruz suggested that the United States begin carpet bombing
Islamic State (IS) forces in Syria, the reaction was swift. Hillary Clinton
mocked candidates who use "bluster and bigotry." Jeb Bush insisted the idea
was "foolish." Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, tweeted: "You
can't carpet bomb an insurgency out of existence. This is just silly."
When CNN's Wolf Blitzer objected that Cruz's proposal would lead to lots of
civilian casualties, the senator retorted somewhat incoherently: "You would
carpet bomb where ISIS is -- not a city, but the location of the troops. You
use air power directed -- and you have embedded special forces to direction
the air power. But the object isn't to level a city. The object is to kill
the ISIS terrorists." PolitiFact drily noted that Cruz apparently didn't
understand what the process of carpet (or "saturation") bombing entails. By
definition, it means bombing a wide area regardless of the human cost.
By almost any standard Cruz's proposal was laughable and his rivals and the
media called him on it. What happened next? By all rights after such a
mixture of inanity and ruthlessness, not to say bloody-mindedness against
civilian populations, his poll numbers should have begun to sag. After all,
he'd just flunked the commander-in-chief test and what might have seemed
like a test of his humanity as well. In fact, his poll numbers actually
crept up. The week before the imbroglio, an ABC opinion poll had registered
him at 15% nationally. By the following week, he was up to 18% and one poll
even had him at a resounding 24%.
How to explain this? While many factors can affect a candidate's polling
numbers, one uncomfortable conclusion can't be overlooked when it comes to
reactions to Cruz's comments: by and large, Americans don't think or care
much about the real-world consequences of the unleashing of American air
power or that of our allies. The other day, Human Rights Watch (HRW)
reported that, in September and October, a Saudi Arabian coalition backed by
the United States "carried out at least six apparently unlawful airstrikes
in residential areas of the [Yemeni] capital," Sana'a. The attacks resulted
in the deaths of 60 civilians. Just about no one in the United States took
notice, nor was it given significant media coverage. More than likely, this
is the first time you've heard about the HRW findings.
You might think that this is because the conflict in Yemen is off our
national radar screen. But how much attention have Americans paid to U.S.
air strikes and bombing runs in Iraq? Washington has literally been bombing
Iraq on and off for twelve years and yet few have taken much notice. That
helps explain why bombing is such an attractive option for Washington any
time trouble breaks out in the world. Americans don't seem to care much what
goes on when our bombs or missiles hit the ground. As pollsters found
recently, a surprising number of Americans even want to bomb places that
can't be found on a map. When Public Policy Polling asked GOP voters in
mid-December if they favored bombing Agrabah, 30% said they did (as did 19%
of Democrats), while only 13% opposed the idea. Agrabah is the fictional
city featured in the Disney movie Aladdin.
Would you support or oppose bombing Agrabah?
Support bombing Agrabah.......... 30%
Oppose bombing Agrabah......... 13%
Not sure................... 57%
That 57% were "not sure" might be considered at least modestly (but not
wildly) reassuring.
Why Cruz's Numbers Went Up
History suggests that this blanket bloodthirstiness or at least lack of
empathy for those on the other end of America's bombing campaigns isn't new.
In March 1951, nine months into the Korean War, Freda Kirchwey, a crusading
liberal journalist at the Nation, expressed bewilderment at American
indifference to the fate of Korean civilians killed by our bombs. The
destruction was awful. Little was left standing, structurally speaking, in
North Korea. Nothing, she complained in a column, "excuses the terrible
shambles created up and down the Korean peninsula by the American-led
forces, by American planes raining down napalm and fire bombs, and by heavy
land and naval artillery." And yet few seemed bothered by it.
Because she was an optimist Kirchwey expressed the hope that Americans would
eventually come to share her own moral anguish at what was being done in
their name. They never did. If anything, the longer the war ground on, the
less Americans seemed interested in the fate of the victims of our bombing.
Why did they show so little empathy? Science helps provide us with an answer
and it's a disturbing one: empathy grows harder as distances -- whether of
status, geography, or both -- increase. Think of it as a matter of our Stone
Age brains. It's hard because in many circumstances an empathic response is,
in fact, an unnatural act. It is not natural, it turns out, for us to feel
empathy for those who look different and speak a different language. It is
not natural for us to empathize with those who are invisible to us, as most
bombing victims were and are. Nor is it natural for us to feel empathy for
people who have what social scientists call "low status" in our eyes, as did
the Korean peasants we were killing. Recent studies show that, faced with a
choice of killing a single individual to save the lives of several people,
we are far more apt to consider doing it if the individual we are
sacrificing is of such low status. When subjects in an experiment are told
that high-status people are being saved, the number willing to let the
low-status victim die actually increases.
Another social science finding helps us understand why empathy is often in
short supply and why Ted Cruz is capable of cavalierly recommending we
carpet bomb Syrians living under the control of the Islamic State. Once we
have convinced ourselves of the necessity and correctness of bombing the
hell out of a country -- as Americans did during the Korean War and as we
are now doing in our war against IS -- the wiring in our Stone Age brain
helps us overcome any hint of guilt we might be inclined to feel over the
ensuing loss of life. It quite naturally acts to dehumanize the distant
victims of our air strikes.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465033008/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465033008/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20This is a
classic case of cognitive dissonance. Our brain hates to feel torn between
conflicting emotions. Instead it rationalizes doing what we want to do by
discounting any feeling that gives rise to negative emotions, in this case,
guilt. An extreme example of this was what happened when the Nazis decided
to stigmatize Jews and later wipe them out. From the moment they began their
ruthless anti-Semitic campaigns, they used hideous imagery to convince other
Germans that Jews were not, like them, human at all, but little different
than rats. It is, of course, far easier to kill someone, or to sit by while
others do the same, if you dehumanize them first. Rather than feeling
empathy for the downtrodden Jews, many Germans felt contempt and disgust,
strong emotions that swamped whatever other feelings they might have had.
In a study a few years ago, researchers measured the activity in the brains
of subjects looking at pictures of homeless people. The finding was
shocking. Brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region of the
brain where empathy is often registered, was significantly lower than
normal. Put another way, the subjects in this experiment literally paid the
homeless no (or at least less) mind.
This may sound cruel and uncaring, but as far as biology is concerned it
makes sense. Our genes, as the biologist Richard Dawkins has taught us, are
"selfish"; they are, that is, built to enhance their own replication, which
is, in effect, their biological imperative. Caring for people who are low in
status, particularly those who belong to another tribe, doesn't serve this
imperative. Indeed, it may interfere with it by diverting the attention of
the host -- that's you and me -- from activities that will enhance our
survival.
Think of this as our Stone-Age brains in action. It's not that we
necessarily make a conscious decision to ignore the fate of people who are
low in status. Our brain does this automatically and seamlessly for us. Out
of conscious awareness it decides if someone is useful to us. If that person
is, our brain quickly achieves a state of hyper-attentiveness: our nostrils
flare, our eyes widen, and our ears tune in relevant sounds. Think of what
happens when you're in the presence of somebody important and you'll know
what I mean. If someone is deemed useless to us? Unless we're worried that
they hyperpose a threat, our brain tells our body to relax.
Because it is in our biological interest to feel empathy for people from our
own tribe and family -- those, that is, in a position to either enhance our
survival or perpetuate our genes -- we come equipped with mechanisms to help
us distinguish our people from outsiders. From the moment we're born, we
focus on those around us and bond with them. A mother and child know each
other through smell. Brother and sister recognize each other's familiar
facial features.
When we hear someone speaking a foreign language, we instinctively discount
their humanity. This was shown in a 2014 experiment designed to determine if
human beings were more willing to sacrifice someone who spoke a different
language in order to save the lives of several others. The findings were
clear-cut. Only 18% of the subjects in the experiment were willing to make
the cold calculation that saving the lives of several people at the cost of
one life was "fair" when the intended victim shared their native language.
However, that percent more than doubled when it was revealed that the person
to be sacrificed spoke a foreign language. The experiment's results remained
the same whether that language was Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, English, or
Spanish.
Why Stories Matter When It Comes to American War
You may be beginning to wonder if we aren't doomed to eternal indifference
to the human beings who suffer when we loose our Air Force on them, but
science offers us a modicum of hope on the subject. In recent years, one of
the strongest findings is that storytelling can break through our
indifference and foster empathy even for distant peoples who might otherwise
seem alien to us. This more than anything else gives us the ability to
empathize with those with whom we don't identify demographically or
otherwise. Stories hold our attention, while feeding the strong urge to find
meaningful patterns in human behavior.
As scientists have now demonstrated in experiments, the brain is a natural
pattern finder. It wants one and one to equal two. Mysterious may be the
will of God, but here on Earth we expect behavior to be explicable. Stories
are designed to establish cause and effect, and once we understand what
motivates people we can usually find a way to empathize with them.
Stories connect us to people in a way nothing else can. It's the reason
politicians regularly tell stories on the campaign trail. Years ago, Harvard
social scientist Howard Gardner set out to discover what highly successful
leaders have in common. After reviewing the lives of 11 luminaries, from
Margaret Thatcher to Martin Luther King, Jr., he concluded that their
success depended to a remarkable extent on their ability to communicate a
compelling story or, as he put it, "narratives that help individuals think
about and feel who they are, where they come from, and where they are
headed." These stories, he found, "constitute the single most powerful
weapon in the leader's literary arsenal."
When people are reduced to numbers -- as were the civilian victims of air
power during the Korean War and as are the civilians who become "collateral
damage" in American air strikes in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere -- we don't
feel their pain, nor do we automatically put ourselves in their shoes, which
is by definition what you do when you are feeling empathic. We have the
bomber pilot's syndrome. We don't feel anything for the victims below.
This is one reason why antiwar movements matter. They tell stories about the
victims of war. It was striking in the Vietnam years, for instance, how many
Americans came to care for, say, a small naked Vietnamese girl napalmed near
her village, or so many other Vietnamese civilians who suffered under a rain
of American bombs, rockets, napalm, and artillery shells. The stories that
the massive antiwar movement regularly told here about the distant world
being decimated by the U.S. war machine created a powerful sense of empathy
among many, including active-duty American soldiers and veterans of the war,
for the plight of the Vietnamese. (It helped that few Americans believed
that North Vietnam posed an existential threat to the United States. Fear
brings out the worst in us.)
Storytelling happens to be in every human's toolkit. We are all born
storytellers and attentive listeners. Biology may incline us to turn a cold
eye on the suffering of people we can't see and don't know, but stories can
liberate us. Ted Cruz may be able to build up his poll numbers by promising
to carpet bomb foreigners in the Middle East of whom we are fearful, but at
least we know that biology doesn't have to dictate our response. Our brains
don't have to stay in the Stone Age. Stories can change us, if we start
telling them.
Rick Shenkman is the editor and founder of the History News Network and the
author most recently of Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in
the Way of Smart Politics (Basic Books, January 2016).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Rick Shenkman
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176088
