The Book Depository Zero Degrees of Empathy by Simon Baron-Cohen

Author: Sphex

Rating: 5

Review: Whatever Jesus may or may not have said about the importance of loving one another, Christians have nevertheless often resorted to violence down the ages. Martin Luther, for example, although a follower of a man who was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, and died a Jew, wrote a pamphlet entitled "Against the Jews" in which he called on his fellow Christians to burn synagogues and destroy Jewish homes. Four hundred years later, the young Adolf Hitler quoted Luther "to give his own Nazi racist views some respectability". The two Nazi scientists, pictured performing a cold water immersion experiment on an inmate of Dachau Concentration Camp, share at least one character trait with Luther: an absence of empathy. All three were educated and intelligent individuals who were nonetheless capable of disregarding the thoughts and feelings of other human beings, of treating them as objects, with tragic consequences. How could they do this? This one image, the first illustration in this engaging and important book, stands for the millions of instances of human cruelty that occurred in that war alone, to say nothing of what can be found in any newspaper on any day of the week. Simon Baron-Cohen's main goal is to understand human cruelty and to replace the unscientific term "evil" with the scientific term "empathy". He wants to move "the debate out of the realm of religion and into the realm of science", not because he is anti-religion (indeed, he regards Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a candidate for someone with super-empathy) but because "religion has been singularly anti-enquiry on the topic of the causes of evil". Baron-Cohen is not satisfied with the circularity of the concept of "evil", with tabloid explanations that would have us believe that the reason so-and-so did such-and-such an evil thing is because, well, so-and-so is evil. Instead, he makes a compelling case for the explanatory power of empathy, how it's distributed in the population, how any individual can experience ups and downs of empathy, how neurological damage can reduce or even eliminate empathy altogether, and how empathy can be acquired or encouraged, either through practice as an adult or, perhaps most importantly, by means of good parenting endowing each child with his or her very own "internal pot of gold". Don't be misled into thinking that this short book must be short on ideas. As with any work of popular science, we see only a fraction of the research that has gone before (much of which is cited in the notes and references). The "ten new ideas" summarized in chapter six give a feel for the scope of empathy as an explanatory tool. These concepts include the "empathy spectrum" and the idea that people at one end of this range have "zero degrees of empathy". Also important to this scientific account, but which may be hard to swallow for anyone used to thinking of evil in metaphysical terms, as some kind of stain on a non-physical soul, is the idea of an "empathy circuit" in the brain. The ventral part of the medial prefrontal cortex doesn't (I imagine) get taught much in Sunday school, and yet its role in thinking about other people's thoughts and feelings marks it out as a crucial region in the brain. The remarkable case of Phineas Gage shows what can happen when the vMPFC is damaged. Gage survived, but he was not the same: his empathy circuit went down. "Treating other people as if they were just objects is one of the worst things you can do to another human being, to ignore their subjectivity, their thoughts and feelings." This is exactly how those Nazi scientists treated the subjects of their experiments (an ironic term, since the prisoners were reduced to mere objects), and it might strike some as strange for science - with its emphasis on objectivity - to have anything at all to say about human feeling. When Baron-Cohen begins listing brain regions and "genes for empathy" (with the usual caveat that genes only ever directly produce proteins), these same sceptics may well feel vindicated. As with all good science, however, the arguments are well supported with evidence and reasons. More broadly, I think this kind of work is an example of the science of human flourishing in action. InThe Moral Landscape Sam Harris develops a powerful case for the importance of science in discriminating between moral values, widely thought to lie outside its scope. However, once we're dealing with facts about human well-being - including, say, facts about levels of empathy - then science not religion is the tool we need. For example, people with zero degrees of empathy divide into Zero-Positive and Zero-Negative. Both types have no awareness of how they come across to others and think only about their own interests. The important difference is that Zero-Positives (e.g. people with Asperger Syndrome), although they are insensitive to others, do not generally commit acts of cruelty, unlike Zero-Negatives (e.g. psychopaths). Such knowledge is vital in sentencing policy. Clearly, while incarcerating some Zero-Negatives who have committed a crime is justified, in a civilized, compassionate society we should be helping Zero-Positives "to find friendship, companionship and other forms of comfort, without jeopardizing anyone's safety". Simon Baron-Cohen makes a bold claim in this brilliant book, that empathy is one of the most valuable resources in the world. I'm persuaded by the arguments, and impressed by the humane motives driving the science. Those whose stories he tells are still people, however damaged they may be, and deserving of the best understanding we can manage. His belief that this is scientific will be controversial to some, but that's nothing new. For me, given that empathy is all about switching from a single- to a double- (or triple-?) minded focus of attention, I wonder if one reason why I enjoy the theatre so much is that it is such a good workout for my empathy circuit. Certainly, anything that helps put you in someone else's shoes is good for world peace!

Author: Rabbit Moon

Rating: 2

Review: There are a few problems with this book: - Its the EXACT SAME book as "The Science of Evil", presumably because that sounds a lot more exciting to potential customers. I blame the author though for letting this happen, and particularly for not mentioning this sly con on the newer title's cover. - Simon name-drops Cambridge A LOT. Also predictably has to reference his more famous cousin Sacha. I get the feeling he is craving approval. - The book is very short. If you take out the extremely jargonistic anatomy elements - which really don't serve the main point of the narrative at all, unless you are wanting to learn brain anatomy - then it comes down to a couple of very short and insubstantial fluffy articles of the kind you might find in Psychologies magazine. - There is a strange circular logic to a lot of the argument, saying that cruelty happens because empathy isn't present, and empathy prevents cruel things happening. My intuition disagrees with the idea that a person is fundamentally 'high' or 'low' on empathy, it seems people associations between empathy and many other groups of people can vary drastically, even within seconds. I'm stunned that Simon's theory doesn't seem to account for this. There was a lot more I felt was missing.