The objectives of this course are: -To introduce participants to different concepts of love, to empower them to be conscious of the power of love and the possibility of practicing it in everyday life, and to highlight in particular the idea of love as a force for social justice. -To communicate a sense of personal strength and empowerment by actively learning from each other and beginning to define how participants can apply their learning in service to society. This course will explore the concept of agape love (compassion/kindness) as a force for social justice and action and as the inspiration for service and the application of knowledge to positive social change. Biological, psychological, religious, and social perspectives of love will be discussed, drawing on the expertise of people from a variety of disciplines. During the six-week course, the following topics will be raised and discussed: kinds of love/defining love; non-violent communication; love and the biology of the brain; love as a basic concept of religious and ethical beliefs (e.g., Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Gandhian); love applied in action, and poetic expressions of love as a social force. This curriculum aims to foster a sense of the importance of love as a key phenomenon in creating community, connection, and functional societies among humans. Course materials will draw from a variety of sources. One of the goals of the class is to provide participants with some knowledge of the literature of love, and readings for the course are listed in the outline of the course on the pages that follow.
Video: Robert Sapolsky in Conversation with Anne
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Love as a Force for Social Justice
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Anne Firth Murray
Well I'm very happy to meet Robert Sapolsky today and have you here for
a conversation about love and the brain.
We're interested in knowing more about the brain but particularly,
how it relates to agape love, kindness and compassion.
So hear whatever you have to say.
>> Well, [COUGH] I think right of the bat,
it's one of those themes about a lot of realms of brain and behavior.
The brain and altruism, the brain and competition,
the brain and aggression, the brain and cooperation.
In that we have a nervous system that sets us up for
being spectacularly good at being compassionate.
And at the same time, we have nervous systems that set us up for
excelling at being miserably awful to other organisms.
And what's always the case with any of these realms of brain and
behavior is just context.
Context over and over and the right setting we are unmatched in
the animal kingdom in terms of the reciprocity we're capable of.
The unreciprocated altruism we're capable of and other settings.
We are barbarians in a way no other primate can approach,
it's just incredibly context dependent.
>> And when you say settings, do you mean interaction with other primates, or
human beings, or are you talking about the environment in general?
>> I mean, other human beings.
We have brains, as in most other primates that set us up for making very,
very fast, very automatic distinctions between who is in us and who is them.
In some regards our brain is doing it on the level of milliseconds [COUGH]
before we even have conscious awareness of not only have we seen this face but
we have already categorized it in some way or other.
Virtually universally, we like uses a whole lot more than thems,
and we show all sorts of in-group bias.
And just when one's about to get all depressed about what that means
about the state of the world.
What's the other defining thing about us is, it is so
easy to manipulate us as to what counts as an us and what counts as a them.
And we could change those categories in a second's time.
And the neurobiology follows suit.
>> Well, I was just going to ask about that, because many of the people I know,
most of the people I know are delighted by the other.
I mean very interested in someone who's different.
And how does that happen, and how can we perhaps encourage it?
>> Well, right off the bat,
I think that suggests that you're hanging out with a bizarre subset of humans.
>> [LAUGH] >> Our world here of people who thrive on
novelty, and define themselves by open-mindedness.
And grow up with the luxury of experiencing
diversity when it's always at its most enriching.
And for most humans, that's usually not the case.
Stick somebody in a brain scanner and you're flashing up faces at them.
You're flashing them up for 50 milliseconds, a 20th of a second.
Just below sort of certainty that you've even seen something.
Your visual cortex isn't even quite processing it.
But flash up the picture of a face of someone from another race and your
average person in that brain scanner will now have activation of their amygdala.
My God, that's like the most depressing thing on Earth.
That's like, are we hard-wired to have this as an us-them distinction?
Now instead, you flash up these faces and all of that, and
flash up the face of an other by that criterion.
And if you've got the right sort of person in that brain scanner,
this person is wearing a baseball cap with the logo for their favorite team.
And the neurological reaction is this isn't us.
This is someone I'd like lay down my life for because we're all rooting for
the same like baseball team.
That's this category that suddenly dominates,
that turns on a dime within a half second.
Hardwired categories, it's nonsense.
We have all of these categories in our heads simultaneously and
which one is at the forefront can just switch in a second.
I mean, just as one bizarre example, if this same part of the brain which in
every mammal out there tells you if you're eating something that is disgusting.
Bacteria, pathogens, spit it out, feel nauseous, throw up.
Somewhere who knows when 50,000 years ago or
something, we evolved the capacity to have moral disgust.
And when we feel morally disgusted, the same part of the brain activates.
>> [LAUGH] >> And we feel queasy and
we feel sick to our stomach.
And no, no, no that's just a metaphor.
It's not like moral disgust does not mean there's pathogens
in your mouth that you now, but we can feel.
That just got somehow like glued to that brain function when that got invented.
So in terms of the brain tinkering, in this realm of love,
one of the most interesting things is this hormone oxytocin
which has lots to do with things that approximate love.
And every mammal out there on Earth, oxytocin plays a central role in what's
probably the most definitely this looks like love thing out there.
Mothers and infants bonding to each other, that's what it evolved for,
the basic circuitry of it.
It has to do with sensory systems in printing,
on who's your mom, who's your kid?
It's got to do with milk letdown, that's its basic job.
And in something like 8% of mammals, it got co-opted who knows when,
to do this other weird thing that a tiny number of mammals do, which is females and
males form a pair bond for life.
So it's got something to do with that
where it doesn't work quite as well because that kind of got duck taped on.
Okay, we just invented this weird thing.
Okay, let's grab this mommy baby hormone and now this has to do
with like giving monkeys, spending their whole life with the same partner.
But then it got co-opted for trust and oxytocin or something with that.
And then it turns out we did something totally bizarre in the last 20,000 years
when you stared into the eyes of your beloved dog.
Both you and the dog secrete oxytocin.
And if you pump up oxytocin levels in your dog,
your dog stares at you longer and your oxytocin levels go higher.
Wait, this is this hormone that existed for
100 million years so that mommies and babies hook up.
And now we're doing it without pet and somehow that’s been co-opted.
And now it turns out when you give somebody oxytocin
they believe a political speech more, they believe a sales pitch more.
There’s a new field called neuro marketing where people are interested in that.
Oxytocin makes you much nicer to in group members but
it makes you more rotten to out group members, this is just of course.
>> [LAUGH] I think most people know your name because of your work with baboons.
Could you speak a little bit about that research and
how it might relate to our questions?
>> Well, baboons are distinctively bereft of things that would,
I think pass for love or compassion or- >> [LAUGH]
>> Or fellow feeling.
I've studied baboons populations about in East Africa in the Serengeti on and
off for about 35 years now.
I go back and forth to the same animals.
And what I've studied over the years is,
what does your social rank and what does your personality,
which is a real scientific word when it comes to other species, not just us.
And what does the social group that you live in
have to do with who gets the stress related diseases?
Who's got the high blood pressure?
Who's gotten the rotten cholesterol levels?
And what I thought I was mostly studying at the beginning is
why is it that being a high ranking baboon does great things for your health?
What it took me about 30 years to figure out is the much more interesting and
important question is to ask, why is it that a baboon
who has social affiliations and social connections has better health?
We've known forever if you were chronically stressed that
does rotten things to your learning and memory.
It does bad things to anxiety levels.
It predisposes us towards learning to be afraid of things that we shouldn't.
It predisposes us towards depression,
it works in the frontal cortex to make our judgement terrible.
But it's only more recent work, and this has been from a few groups,
including mine, looking at a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate.
It's perfect cortex and if you want an incredibly like simplified soundbite as to
what it has to do with any of this stuff, it's got something to do with empathy.
>> [LAUGH] >> Poke somebody's finger with a pin and
all sorts of pain related pathways in the brain activate,
including the anterior cingulate.
It's not telling you whether it's this finger or
this finger which is in pain, it's telling you what the meaning is of it.
It's a more integrative cortical part of the brain.
Now instead poke the fingertip of your loved one, and
watch that, and the anterior cingulate activates.
The parts of the brain that are saying, was it my finger or my toe?
They're sound asleep, this isn't their problem.
But it's the anterior cingulate.
It's got something to do with empathy.
>> Empathy is one thing, compassion is another.
>> Yeah.
>> I can feel sad, and I can feel empathy toward this person who's been hurt.
But am I going to do something about it?
>> Good, let's talk about that.
[CROSSTALK] >> Compassion,
basically Takes that next step and actually.
[CROSSTALK] >> Good, that's an incredibly interesting
distinction.
Okay, one of the people who have spent a long time studying psychology,
the biology of say, moral development.
And it turns out, in that literature that gives you virtually zero prediction as to
who's going to step out of the crowd and
do the scary thing that none the less is the right thing to do, total dislocation.
In the same way, from my literature there's a remarkable dissociation between
the intensity with which you feel sympathy, with which you feel empathy and
actually going and doing something to help someone.
And in a remarkably clear readout you get people in
a distressed empathic state about somebody else going through something painful.
And the question is whether they are going to, in effect,
find a way to I can't deal with this anymore versus actually do something.
Look at their blood pressure.
If their blood pressure, their heart rate,
their sympathetic nervous system is aroused and going like crazy.
What they're most likely going to be thinking about is how unpleasant
this is for them, and they're going to turn the other way.
If this is someone who is in effect suspiciously
dispassionately being able to recognize the reality of that
person in need in addition to the froth of their own empathy.
If they're not getting swamped with really visceral responses, that's the person
who's much more likely to be able to go and actually do something about it.
In a sense that that's the autonomic nervous system equivalent of sort of
Buddhist views of you need a certain detachment, you need a certain distance.
We're very bad at intensely feeling somebody else's distress and
not kind of getting sidetracked into getting a little bit preoccupied with
how distressed we're feeling at the time.
I mean you don't suspect there's a whole lot of evenings where
Bill Gates is sitting there in agony over the pains of the world because he's so
emphatically flooded with it.
Instead he is bringing just a tactical, cerebral approach
to doing more good in a more thought out distanced kind of way.
That's a remarkably adult sort of way in which one
turns empathy as a construct into actual compassionate action.
>> I was nodding my head because I have classes full of students who are in my
other class learning about international women’s health and human rights.
And the concern and the desire to make change, what can I do?
And it's a little hard for them to immediately
swallow my advice which is learn, be as good as student as you possibly can.
And then in the next phase of life act.
This is what you can do.
They want to get on plane and of course [CROSSTALK].
>> And it's wonderful.
>> It is.
>> It's wonderful but when I was 16 my mother caught me just
about ready to mail off a check of what had been all of my bank savings to
a foundation that was trying to save mountain gorillas.
Wait, that's for college.
You can't.
>> Absolutely.
>> It's amazing, it's wonderful.
It's often not very effective.
And the big downside of adult skillful dispassionate effectiveness at it is
you're about one and half neurons away at that point at skillful and
dispassionate ways of figuring out why it's not really your problem.
And you're way too busy, and somebody else will take care of that.
So that's the downside, [INAUDIBLE].
That's funny.
>> Well thanks again.
This is very, very nice of you to take the time.
I really appreciate it.
>> Sure, sure.
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