Empathy, Mirror-Neurons, Technology and War

The inhibitory apparatus in place for 'professional' killer animals, those with teeth designed to rip and puncture flesh, jaws that are built to crush bones, claws intended to shred meat and capture prey, which prevent them from annihilating their own species is not in place for humans. Humans were not designed to be specialized killers, like panthers, lions, or tigers. Early humans, similar to other primates were largely foragers, scavengers, and opportunists. Nobel Prize winner and zoologist Konrad Lorenz notes that a human being is:

... Basically It was the first flint chiseled into a jagged point that became the human's bloody 'tooth and claw.' Technology made humans lethal, not evolution.

If there was no inhibitory mechanism, what then, stopped early humans from annihilating their own species? Jean Jacques Rousseau, one of the most influential thinkers of the Enlightenment would say it was innate 'pity' or compassion:

Such is the pure motion of nature, anterior to all manner of reflection; such is the force of natural pity, which the most dissolute manners have as yet found it so difficult to extinguish... It is therefore certain that pity is a natural sentiment, which, by moderating in every individual the activity of self-love, contributes to the mutual preservation of the whole species. It is this pity which hurries us without reflection to the assistance of those we see in distress; it is this pity which, in a state of nature, stands for laws, for manners, for virtue, with this advantage, that no one is tempted to disobey her sweet and gentle voice: it is this pity which will always hinder a robust savage from plundering a feeble child, or infirm old man.
Twenty-first century neuroscientists are more likely to call it 'empathy', a function of brain cells called 'mirror' neurons.

"Mirror-neurons are cells that respond selectively to the visual perception of another individual's physical action" (Easton 145). Neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese explains, "The same neural structures that are involved in processing and controlling executed actions, felt sensations and emotions are also active when the same actions, sensations and emotions are to be detected in others." These brain cells respond the same way if someone is performing an action or watching the action performed by another. In this way, empathy occurs. According to researchers Jean Decety and Philip Jackson, "Empathy involves not only the affective experience of the other person's actual or inferred emotional state but also some minimal recognition and understanding of another's emotional state... Shared neural representations, self-awareness, mental flexibility, and emotion regulation constitute the basic macrocomponents of empathy which are underpinned by specific neural systems." This process could explain the emotional damage that often happens to combatants on the battlefield. When a soldier-warrior sees the expression on the face of someone he had wounded or killed, this natural process, which under the circumstances of combat he cannot and should not recognize at the time, must never-the-less be taking place. The results are "shell shock" or post traumatic syndrome because, on a cellular level, the soldier is feeling his enemy's pain, terror, or rage.

Through technological advances humans have extended their lethality past the equipment endowed to them by nature. Psychologist Richard Strozzi-Heckler, invited by the U.S. Military to teach awareness disciplines to a group of Marine Green Berets observes the technology that has given the modern warrior the ability to:

... Pitch bombs from 20,000 feet in the morning, causing untold suffering to a civilization population and then eat hamburgers for dinner hundreds of miles away from the drop zone. The prehistoric warrior met his foe in a direct struggle of sinew, muscle, and spirit. If flesh was torn or bone broken he felt it give way under his hand. And though death was more rare than common (perhaps because he felt the pulse of life and the nearness of death under his fingers), he also had to live his days remembering the man's eyes whose skull he crushed (130).

The physical distance that technology creates circumvents the natural human empathetic response. Could it not be said then that the use of hi-tech, complex, precision weaponry might be creating soldiers who are less 'human' than the prehistoric combatants describes by Strozzi-Heckler? With no built-in inhibitory mechanism to prevent wholesale slaughter of the species, and with less opportunity to mirror other humans' suffering that results in empathy, over time the capacity to empathize may disappear altogether. "Technology," notes Jonathan Glover, "has created forms of cold violence that should disturb us more than the beast of rage in man. The great military atrocities now use bombs or missiles. The decisions are taken coldly, far away.

When discussing the possibility of the loss of empathy in the future, the question of past and current atrocities of war and the apparent lack of empathy should arise. What happens to units of properly trained and ordinarily well disciplined soldiers that slaughter whole villages of civilians, as happened with Charlie Company in the village if My Lai in the Vietnam war in 1968(Hamilton). Was the neural connection to the empathic brain region hopelessly short-circuit before Company C executed the unarmed old men, women, and children in the village? Sadly, there are dozens of examples of incidents like the My Lai massacre and dozens more theories about the processes that allowed this kind of behavior. In their abstract "Affect, Agency and Responsibility: The Act of Killing in the Age of Cyborgs" Roger Pippin and John Provtevi speculate that for members of a military unit, "the act of killing is not the individual person or subject, but the emergent assemblage of military unit and non-subjective reflex"(5). In other words, through relinquishing agency, the soldier is not in control of his actions even though it is his body that is doing the action: individual members meld into the group, which of course has no neurons to mirror the victims' reactions. Psychological and emotional variables such as fear, demands of authority, group absolution, and moral, social, or cultural distance all factor into the equation(Grossman passim). Additionally the soldier-warrior may experience rage which can develop "into a full-fledged neural phenomenon with its own circuits" (Pippin).

Clearly understanding the willingness, or even the ability, of some to participate in atrocities is complex web of physical and emotional interactions for which there is no single explanation. However, some of the more perplexing mysteries of human behavior regarding the nature and importance to society of empathy are beginning to be solved by science. A society that has more insight into the problems and complexities of empathy and aggression can then set about the task of deciding what kind of soldiers it wants to be defending it. In the introduction of In Search for the Warrior Spirit, George Leonard asks if:

Those of us who love peace have no soldiers at all? And if we do have soldiers, do we really want them to be deprived of the best possible training? Do we want low-grade soldiers with no awareness or empathy? And if we do teach awareness and empathy to our soldiers will they be able to perform the brutal tasks sometimes assigned to them? Surely we don't want a hoard of Rambos loosed upon the world. But if not Rambo, then who?
These questions require somber and sober introspection. The danger presented by the combination of weapons able to kill hundred of thousands of humans, such as nuclear bombs, in the hands of aggressive humans endowed by nature with only tenuous neurological connections to empathic reasoning demand answers. The best way to control the threat of unrestrained conspecific eradication is to acknowledge and understand the whole of human biological nature.

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