Our Better Angels

What gave Abraham Lincoln the strength to persevere through the years of secession and civil war, and to show such magnanimity in his Second Inaugural Address? He was, it seems, a melancholy, even depressive person, and he was also a compassionate man who suffered with those he sent to war, as well as with the personal loss of a son in 1862. If there is a single explanation, it might be in the very last words of his First Inaugural. They can be dismissed as mere rhetoric, a calculated appeal to the South. But I believe that Lincoln did, at the core of his being, believe in “the better angels of our nature,” and have faith they would one day come to the fore.

In the last issue of Independent School, I considered some of the distressing news about humanity being discovered by various physical and social scientists. But there are countervailing views and discoveries about our minds and our mores, enough for us to hope for the frequent, if not universal, triumph of our better angels.

Given the claim that we lack conscious control over the majority of our behaviors, it might seem that personal and societal improvement is a chimera, a mirage on the horizon that we may plod toward, but which we have no hope of reaching. However, two books, one from the perspective of a psychiatrist and the other from that of a business journalist, tell a very different story about what happens inside our heads.

Jeffrey M. Schwartz’s The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, cowritten with journalist Sharon Begley, describes the psychiatrist-author’s work with one of the hardest mental illnesses to treat: obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). If there are indeed forces driving our behavior over which we have little or no control, OCD must be a model par excellence for them. Yet Schwartz’s work reveals that even OCD patients can learn to change by training the power of conscious attention on the manifestations of their affliction. Perhaps more important, he demonstrates that changing one’s behavior by, so to speak, changing one’s mind, produces physical changes in the brain.

Distressed by the aversive, and sometimes degrading, methods currently being used to treat OCD, Schwartz and his colleagues decided to try a different approach. They asked patients to see their compulsions as brain events that they could choose to act upon or not (“‘The brain’s gonna do what the brain’s gonna do,’ I told them, ‘but you don’t have to let it push you around.’”), then to refocus on a distracting act to perform instead of the compelled one. The results were profound: changed behavior, ability to control the compulsion, and a literal rewiring of the brain.

Schwartz takes us through a great deal of recent science, but his work, and that of our next author, is rooted in the insights of the father of American psychology, William James, who first pointed out both the power of habit and the role conscious attention plays in our lives. James, a great proponent of free will, maintained that it was just there, in the choice of what to attend to, that our freedom lay.

A similar argument is made by Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Duhigg begins with the case of a woman who used similar strategies to change from being overweight, tobacco-addicted, and unemployable to being a happily employed marathon runner, and whose brain scans also revealed to her doctors that “one set of neurological patterns — her old habits — had been overridden by new patterns. They could still see the neural activity of her old behaviors, but those impulses were crowded out by new urges. As Lisa’s habits changed, so had her brain.” 

Duhigg spends less time than Schwartz on brain science, and more on the stories of individuals, from Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps to AA founder Bill Wilson, and of companies such as Starbucks and Alcoa. He explains that people and organizations can make profound changes through specific steps: discover the pattern that causes a problem; break it into the cues for the behavior, the behavioral routine, and the expected reward; then find a new and positive routine to replace the negative one when the cue arises. (If you go to the faculty room at a certain time every day and eat whatever treats have been put out there, go outside instead, or go talk with someone to gain the social or psychological benefits of the break without the caloric side effect.) Duhigg also exposes some of the insidious techniques that businesses are using to create new habits in their customers. His hopeful conclusion, even in the face of such powerful seducers is that “habits — even once they are rooted in our minds — aren’t destiny. We can choose our habits, once we know how.” 

Understanding behavioral triggers can also change public behavior, according to Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein in Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. The authors, an economist and an attorney, cover several arenas, from keeping airport bathrooms clean to helping employees save for retirement, showing in each case how a simple strategy, like opt-out pension plans instead of opt-in ones, can gently lead behavior in more productive directions, without coercion on the part of governments or private institutions. They call their approach libertarian paternalism, and offer both existing examples (routine enrollment of all citizens in organ donation unless they object, as done in much of Europe), and suggestions for helping people make wiser choices in investing, buying health insurance, and even finding the best option in auto trade-ins.

Along with the news that we can change our individual behavior by focused attention and planned strategies, there is also increasing evidence that we as a species can overcome our tendencies toward conflict, and draw on equally powerful drives toward working together. Yochai Benkler’s The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest gives both a historical account of our overemphasis on self-interest and competition, and proof that we indeed have countervailing tendencies. For many years, Benkler argues, a complex of ideas drawn from misinterpreted Darwinism, Freudian visions of the id-superego struggle, and Cold War ideological differences had led to an almost obsessive attention to conflict, which was taken to be rooted in our genetic makeup. Believing in conflict, we saw it everywhere, in ourselves and all around us.

Today, however, research on our cousin the bonobo, on chimpanzees, and even rats; on infants and young children; and on groups of people collaborating on the Internet or during major disasters, all seem to show that we are, at heart, a cooperative species far more often than a competitive one. Animal studies, for example, have found that rats and chimpanzees will not press a lever to get food when that lever also shocks a neighboring member of the species. Babies under a year old show a marked preference for puppets or animated figures they have seen helping others, rather than ones that have harmed or hindered others. In A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit covers disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to Hurricane Katrina, to demonstrate that — often contrary to the fears of the authorities — helping behaviors, both in the moment and sustained for days, were evident during the time of crisis. As Solnit observes, “Beliefs matter… and often the worst behavior in the wake of a calamity is on the part of those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism.” 

Benkler draws on many of these instances, but his greatest interest is in the power of our cooperative tendencies when amplified by technology. (He is also the author of The Wealth of Networks, a more academic study of the pooling of knowledge worldwide.) Benkler, like Daniel Pink and others, explains how projects like Kiva, Wikipedia, Linux, and Apache link thousands of individuals in enterprises that are altering international investment, knowledge sharing, and technology. Such projects often outcompete giants like Microsoft and IBM by appealing to needs and motives far removed from profit making. Some of the giants even join in: “By 2000 IBM…was investing a billion dollars in free software, and by 2003 it was making more money from selling services built around Linux than from all its patent royalties put together — even though IBM is the largest patent holder in the United States.”

Benkler is the most erudite and wide-ranging of our authors, moving easily from Hobbes and Hume, Proudhon and Kropotkin, to Radiohead and YouTube. But he also writes with simplicity and common sense, and provides an encouraging but not utopian vision of the individual: “We know ourselves to be selfish, but we also know ourselves to be generous, fair-minded, and decent. We know that we are imperfectly both.” 

He has something to say about those better angels, too: “In life, we take chances on one another. We trust, and we behave in trustworthy ways. Not always; not with everyone. But much more often than the cynical and unflattering views of human nature and interaction would predict.”