THE TANDEM PROJECT
UNITED NATIONS, HUMAN RIGHTS,
FREEDOM OF RELIGION OR BELIEF
WE MAY BE BORN WITH AN URGE TO
HELP
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Issue: Evolution - the instinct for fairness may be as important
as politics, culture or religion
For: United Nations, Governments, Religions or Beliefs,
Academia, NGOs, Media, Civil Society
Review: We May Be Born With an Urge to
Help, By Nicolas
Wade, New York Times Science Section,
Excerpt: “What is the essence of human nature? Flawed say many
theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need
of considerable improvement, think many parents. But biologists are beginning
to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in
part from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the
differences will point to what is distinctively human.”
What is the essence of
human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare,
wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many
parents.
But biologists are
beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are
derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing
human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will
point to what is distinctively human.
The somewhat surprising
answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately
sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be
selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness
to help.
When infants 18 months old
see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a
door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael
Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in
October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max
Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig,
The helping behavior seems
to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children
the rules of polite behavior.
“It’s probably safe to
assume that they haven’t been explicitly and directly taught to do this,” said
Elizabeth Spelke, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. “On the other hand,
they’ve had lots of opportunities to experience acts of helping by others. I
think the jury is out on the innateness question.”
But Dr. Tomasello finds
the helping is not enhanced by rewards, suggesting that it is not influenced by
training. It seems to occur across cultures that have different timetables for
teaching social rules. And helping behavior can even be seen in infant
chimpanzees under the right experimental conditions. For all these reasons, Dr.
Tomasello concludes that helping is a natural inclination, not something
imposed by parents or culture.
Infants will help with
information, as well as in practical ways. From the age of 12 months they will
point at objects that an adult pretends to have lost. Chimpanzees, by contrast,
never point at things for each other, and when they point for people, it seems
to be as a command to go fetch something rather than to share information.
For parents who may think
their children somehow skipped the cooperative phase, Dr. Tomasello offers the
reassuring advice that children are often more cooperative outside the home,
which is why parents may be surprised to hear from a teacher or coach how nice
their child is. “In families, the competitive element is in ascendancy,” he
said.
As children grow older,
they become more selective in their helpfulness. Starting around age 3, they
will share more generously with a child who was previously nice to them.
Another behavior that emerges at the same age is a sense of social norms. “Most
social norms are about being nice to other people,” Dr. Tomasello said in an
interview, “so children learn social norms because they want to be part of the
group.”
Children not only feel
they should obey these rules themselves, but also that they should make others
in the group do the same. Even 3-year-olds are willing to enforce social norms.
If they are shown how to play a game, and a puppet then joins in with its own
idea of the rules, the children will object, some of them vociferously.
Where do they get this
idea of group rules, the sense of “we who do it this way”? Dr. Tomasello
believes children develop what he calls “shared intentionality,” a notion of
what others expect to happen and hence a sense of a group “we.” It is from this
shared intentionality that children derive their sense of norms and of
expecting others to obey them.
Shared intentionality, in
Dr. Tomasello’s view, is close to the essence of what distinguishes people from
chimpanzees. A group of human children will use all kinds of words and gestures
to form goals and coordinate activities, but young chimps seem to have little
interest in what may be their companions’ minds.
If children are naturally
helpful and sociable, what system of child-rearing best takes advantage of this
surprising propensity? Dr. Tomasello says that the approach known as inductive
parenting works best because it reinforces the child’s natural propensity to
cooperate with others. Inductive parenting is simply communicating with
children about the effect of their actions on others and emphasizing the logic
of social cooperation.
“Children are altruistic
by nature,” he writes, and though they are also naturally selfish, all parents
need do is try to tip the balance toward social behavior.
The shared intentionality
lies at the basis of human society, Dr. Tomasello argues. From it flow ideas of
norms, of punishing those who violate the norms and of shame and guilt for
punishing oneself. Shared intentionality evolved very early in the human
lineage, he believes, and its probable purpose was for cooperation in gathering
food. Anthropologists report that when men cooperate in hunting, they can take
down large game, which single hunters generally cannot do. Chimpanzees gather
to hunt colobus monkeys, but Dr. Tomasello argues this is far less of a
cooperative endeavor because the participants act on an ad hoc basis and do not
really share their catch.
An interesting bodily
reflection of humans’ shared intentionality is the sclera, or whites, of the
eyes. All 200 or so species of primates have dark eyes and a barely visible
sclera. All, that is, except humans, whose sclera is three times as large, a
feature that makes it much easier to follow the direction of someone else’s
gaze. Chimps will follow a person’s gaze, but by looking at his head, even if
his eyes are closed. Babies follow a person’s eyes, even if the experimenter
keeps his head still.
Advertising what one is
looking at could be a risk. Dr. Tomasello argues that the behavior evolved “in
cooperative social groups in which monitoring one another’s focus was to
everyone’s benefit in completing joint tasks.”
This could have happened
at some point early in human evolution, when in order to survive, people were
forced to cooperate in hunting game or gathering fruit. The path to obligatory
cooperation — one that other primates did not take — led to social rules and
their enforcement, to human altruism and to language.
“Humans putting their
heads together in shared cooperative activities are thus the originators of
human culture,” Dr. Tomasello writes.
A similar conclusion has
been reached independently by Hillard S. Kaplan, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico.
Modern humans have lived for most of their existence as hunter gatherers; so
much of human nature has presumably been shaped for survival in such
conditions. From study of existing hunter gatherer peoples, Dr. Kaplan has
found evidence of cooperation woven into many levels of human activity.
The division of labor
between men and women — men gather 68 percent of the calories
in foraging societies — requires cooperation between the sexes. Young people in
these societies consume more than they produce until age 20, which in turn
requires cooperation between the generations. This long period of dependency
was needed to develop the special skills required for the hunter gatherer way
of life.
The structure of early
human societies, including their “high levels of cooperation between kin and
nonkin,” was thus an adaptation to the “specialized foraging niche” of food
resources that were too difficult for other primates to capture, Dr. Kaplan and
colleagues wrote recently in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society. We evolved to be nice to each other, in other words, because there was
no alternative.
Much the same conclusion
is reached by Frans de Waal in another book published in October, “The Age of
Empathy.” Dr. de Waal, a primatologist, has long studied the cooperative side
of primate behavior and believes that aggression, which he has also studied, is
often overrated as a human motivation.
“We’re preprogrammed to
reach out,” Dr. de Waal writes. “Empathy is an automated response over which we
have limited control.” The only people emotionally immune to another’s
situation, he notes, are psychopaths.
Indeed, it is in our
biological nature, not our political institutions, that we should put our
trust, in his view. Our empathy is innate and cannot be changed or long suppressed.
“In fact,” Dr. de Waal writes, “I’d argue that biology constitutes our greatest
hope. One can only shudder at the thought that the humaneness of our societies
would depend on the whims of politics, culture or religion.”
The basic sociability of
human nature does not mean, of course, that people are nice to each other all
the time. Social structure requires that things be done to maintain it, some of
which involve negative attitudes toward others. The instinct for enforcing
norms is powerful, as is the instinct for fairness. Experiments have shown that
people will reject unfair distributions of money even it means they receive
nothing.
“Humans clearly evolved
the ability to detect inequities, control immediate desires, foresee the
virtues of norm following and gain the personal, emotional rewards that come
from seeing another punished,” write three Harvard biologists, Marc Hauser,
Katherine McAuliffe and Peter R. Blake, in reviewing their experiments with
tamarin monkeys and young children.
If people do bad things to
others in their group, they can behave even worse to those outside it. Indeed
the human capacity for cooperation “seems to have evolved mainly for
interactions within the local group,” Dr. Tomasello writes.
Sociality, the binding
together of members of a group, is the first requirement of defense, since
without it people will not put the group’s interests ahead of their own or be
willing to sacrifice their lives in battle. Lawrence H. Keeley, an
anthropologist who has traced aggression among early peoples, writes in his
book “War Before Civilization” that, “Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the
human capacity for cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of
it.”
The roots of human
cooperation may lie in human aggression. We are selfish by nature, yet also
follow rules requiring us to be nice to others.
“That’s why we have moral
dilemmas,” Dr. Tomasello said, “because we are both selfish and altruistic at
the same time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01human.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print
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Documents Attached:
We May Be Born With an Urge to Help
Pope Leads Seminar on Evolution
The Tandem Project is a non-governmental organization (NGO)
founded in 1986 to build understanding, tolerance and respect for diversity,
and to prevent discrimination in matters relating to freedom of religion or
belief. The Tandem Project has sponsored multiple conferences, curricula,
reference materials and programs on Article 18 of the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights – Everyone shall have the right to freedom of
thought, conscience and religion - and 1981 United Nations Declaration on the
Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or
Belief.
The Tandem Project is a UN NGO in
Special Consultative Status with the
Economic and Social Council of
the United Nations
***
Surely one of the best hopes for humankind
is to embrace a culture in which religions and other beliefs accept one
another, in which wars and violence are not tolerated in the name of an
exclusive right to truth, in which children are raised to solve conflicts with
mediation, compassion and understanding.
United Nations Secretary
General Ban Ki Moon, at the first Alliance of Civilizations Madrid Forum;
“never in our lifetime has there been a more desperate need for constructive
and committed dialogue, among individuals, among communities, among cultures,
among and between nations.”
In 1968 the UN stopped
work on an International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Religious Intolerance because of the sensitivity and complexity of reconciling
a human rights treaty with dissonant worldviews and voices on religion or
belief.
Instead in 1981 the United Nations adopted a
non-binding Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of
Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, as support for Article 18 of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:
http://www.tandemproject.com/program/81_dec.htm
The title, Separation of Religion or Belief and State reflects the
far-reaching scope of General Comment 22 on Article 18, International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights, 1993, UN Human Rights Committee.
http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(Symbol)/9a30112c27d1167cc12563ed004d8f15?Opendocument
Inclusive and genuine
dialogue on human rights and freedom of religion or belief are between people
of theistic, non-theistic and atheistic beliefs, as well as the right not to
profess any religion or belief. It calls for open dialogue on: awareness,
understanding, acceptance; cooperation, competition, conflict; respectful
discourse, discussion of taboos and clarity by persons of diverse beliefs.
Human rights protect
freedom of religion or belief; religion or belief does not always protect human
rights. In one respect human rights must trump religion to protect individuals
against all forms of discrimination on grounds of religion or belief by the
State, institutions, groups of persons and persons. After forty years
suffering, violence and conflict has increased in many parts of the world based
on belief. The UN option may be to slowly challenge the status quo or consider
a call for a new paradigm deferred since 1968.
Is it time for the UN to draft a legally-binding
International Convention on Freedom of Religion or Belief. United Nations History –
Freedom of Religion or Belief