The birth of empathy

Always strive to be better

Anthropologist Margaret Mead is believed to have said during a lecture that scientists can trace back to the birthplace of human civilization.

Take a second and think about your best guess.

No, it wasn’t the first tool, the first use of fire, the first constructed habitat. It was the first evidence a human being had broken their femur and recovered from the injury, dating back about 15,000 years ago.

In the animal kingdom, a broken femur is a death sentence. You can’t run away from danger. You can’t cross large distances to drink or eat. Most often, the injured animal is left behind because it is slowing down the herd. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.

A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone took time to stay with the person who was injured, had bound up the wound, had carried the person to safety and tended the person through their six-week recovery.

“Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts,” Mead said. “We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.”

To me, that also was the birthplace of empathy, the ability to put yourself in the perspective of another. Someone 15,000 years ago saw an injured family member or friend and decided they would put themselves at risk to ensure that person survived their broken leg. They hoped that others would do the same for them if they were ever in a similar situation.

Once that person healed, they were able to contribute to their society once again. Who knows what that group of ancient humans would have missed out on if that injured person had been left behind to die like so many others in our pre-civilized history.

There are many parallels of this first sign of civilization and our modern society.

There are plenty of people born today who previously would have been treated as “lessers” in their societies, whether it be due to disability, gender, race, religion, sexuality, etc.

Hell, when Adolf Hitler first created his concentration camps in the 1930s, the first people sent there were people who believed differently than him politically. Once they were out of the way, it was time to send the homosexuals, the gypsies, the mentally handicapped and the Jewish population. If you weren’t white and Aryan, you faced execution.

At the time, Hitler was convinced he was making his country stronger by eliminating people he thought of as “weak,” but the American experiment has proven him wrong.

Whether it was African American Jesse Owens dominating the 1936 Olympics in Germany with four gold medals, homosexual Alan Turing cracking the German’s Enigma machine during World War II or Jewish physicist Albert Einstein suggesting the idea for creating the first nuclear bomb, the ideas and feats of people deemed “other” by some societies made incredible contributions during that era that eventually helped overthrow Nazism.

It’s important to remember those lessons today.

When I see a news story about someone being mistreated, I try to put myself in their shoes to better understand the situation. Sure, I’m a straight, white man, and this story may not affect me, but what if I wasn’t?

What if I was a gay person trying to adopt a child with my partner? What if I was a trans person who just wanted to use the bathroom or serve in the military? What if I was a Black man who had been pulled over by the police in a white neighborhood? What if I was a 10-year U.S. resident with an American family who was fleeing persecution and had been illegally deported to a brutal El Salvadoran prison despite a court order saying that wasn’t allowed to happen?

Putting yourself in the shoes of others is one of the best ways to understand people who you may disagree with as well.

I get frustrated arguing online with people in the anti-vaccine community, especially with the recent outbreak of measles in the United States, but I also have to understand that these people think they’re being helpful. They aren’t being malicious. They were told that vaccines are more dangerous than the disease the vaccine is supposed to prevent and they believed it. It’s up to me to try to keep that in mind when conversing with them.

The most difficult thing for me today is debating someone who lacks empathy. They don’t care about something because it doesn’t affect them personally. They can’t understand why someone is upset about something that doesn’t harm them because they can’t put themselves in someone else’s point of view.

It’s that lack of empathy that traces back to the birthplace of civilization. The people who lack it, they may have seen that injured person with the broken leg 15,000 years ago and left them to die.

But we’re better than that now. We have to be.

Take the advice from Mead. Be civilized.