Radical Empathy: From Mirror Neurons to Moral Neuropolitics By Gary Olson

Empathy is the only human superpower—it can shrink distance, cut through social and power hierarchies, transcend differences, and provoke political and social change.

—Elizabeth Thomas

The success of the abolitionist movement lay in its making real for people in Britain and America the slave ship's pervasive and utterly instrumental terror, which was indeed its defining feature.
—Marcus Rediker


The official directives needn't be explicit to be well understood: Do not let too much empathy move in unauthorized directions.

—Norman Solomon


In his magisterial study, The Slave Ship, maritime historian Marcus Rediker has documented the role played by emotional and especially visual appeals in ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Not unlike the structural violence endemic to global capitalism today, the abolitionist James Field Stanfield argued that the terrible truths of the slave trade "had been withheld from the public eye by every effort that interest, ingenuity, and influence, could devise." (Rediker, 2007, p. 133)
Therefore, "Stanfield appealed to the immediate, visceral experience of the slave ship, over and against abstract knowledge about the slave trade, as decisive to abolition. . . ." (p. 156) The abolitionist's most potent weapon was the dissemination of drawings of the slave ship Brooks. Rediker asserts that these images were "to be among the most effective propaganda any social movement has ever created." (p. 308)

Based on recent findings from neuroscience we can plausibly deduce that the mirror neurons of the viewer were engaged by these images of others suffering. The appeal was to the public's awakened sense of compassion and revulsion toward graphic depictions of the wholesale violence, barbarity, and torture routinely practiced on these Atlantic voyages. Rediker notes that the images would instantaneously "make the viewer identify and sympathize with the ‘injured Africans' on the lower deck of the ship . . ." while also producing a sense of moral outrage. (p. 315, Olson, 2008)

In our own day, the nonprofit Edge Foundation recently asked some of the world's most eminent scientists, "What are you optimistic about? Why?" In response, the prominent neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni cited the proliferating experimental work into the neural mechanisms that reveal how humans are "wired for empathy." This is the aforementioned discovery of the mirror neuron system or MNS. The work shows that the same affective brain circuits are automatically mobilized upon feeling one's own pain and the pain of others.


Iacoboni's optimism is grounded in his belief that with the popularization of scientific insights, these findings in neuroscience will seep into public awareness and " . . . this explicit level of understanding our empathic nature will at some point dissolve the massive belief systems that dominate our societies and that threaten to destroy us." (Iacoboni, 2007, p. 14). His new book, Mirroring People (2008) as well as Rizzolati and Sinigaglia's Mirrors in the Brain (2008) promise to make this new work accessible to the lay public. In similar fashion, Steven Pinker concludes a recent piece on the science of morality with these challenging but hopeful words from Anton Chekov, "Man will become better when you show him what he is like." (Pinker, 2008)
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